Rendez vous (1985)
It’s always interesting to see an early film of a great actor or actress.
Juliettte Binoche made her debut in the André Techine-directed film Rendez-vous when she was just 21.
She went on to become a most successful actress in Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue (1993), The English Patient (1996) and Chocolat (2000) and is now one is now one of France’s leading actresses.
In this film she plays Nina a young aspiring actress coming to Paris to make her fortune. She visits an estate agent Paulot to find cheap accommodation and he suggests she moves in to his own apartment that he shares with Quentin, an emotionally troubled actor, played by Lambert Wilson.
Both fall for Nina.
Quentin seems to enjoy both confronting her – which he does with a suicide attempt – and humiliating her. He invited her to his porno stage version of Romeo and Juliet in which he had sex with Juliet in nets above the audience. Nina walks out. In another scene she is asleep on her front. He invites Paulot into the bedroom – removes her sheet so that her nudity is exposed – and feels her between the legs.
The best French actors and actresses are not conventionally beautiful. I’m thinking here of Jean Paul Belmondo, Isabell Huppert and Julie Delpy.
La Binoche is also not conventionally beautiful, but her face – especially her eyes – has an arresting quality.
Her figure is not winsome and she does not have the bust of Brigitte Bardot.
Yet like all great actresses she inhabits her rôle.
Chocolat was adapted from a novel by Joanne Harris and apparently Binoche once pitched up at the Harris home out of the blue on her doorstep so as interpret her part better.
In Rendez – vous she has to play many roles: as the aspiring young actress in a silly domestic comedy in which she plays a coquettish maid, she has to Learn her lines for the role of Juliet in which she is cast by the enigmatic director Schutzel (played by the great Jean Louis Trinitignant) and fend off the unwanted advances of Quentin and Paulot.
In seeing the dvd cover my missus Gail gave me some grief (“Watching porn again!”) but I defended Binoche’s rôle and the Cannes Award-winning film.
Juliette Binoche in Rendez-vous mirrored her own life as a young actress making her way. She had to act alongside two well-established stars but created her own identity and went to join Marion Cotillard, Léa Seydouz and Catherine Deneuve in the upper echelons of French Cinema.
