DVD Review: Rendez-Vous

With Juliette Binoche
Review by Terrence Gelenter

I was once ”this” close to Juliette Binoche – at a junket for The English Patient and I fully understood for the first time the meaning of the word breathtaking.

In Rendez-Vous, her first major film role, she is a 20 year-old playing a 20 year-old. And she has not yet become the incomparably luminescent, elegantly sensual star that we know but rather a raw near-beauty still to be refined by experience and maturity.

Her free-spirited Nina arrives in Paris to become an actress, and Juliette is nonchalantly naked on numerous occasions taking sex where she finds it and without shame - tacitly swapping sex for lodging.

Among her lovers are Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak), a timid real estate clerk infatuated with her and Quentin (Lambert Wilson), an emotionally scarred actor who performs in live sex shows. Screen legend Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a stage director who casts Nina in his production of Romeo and Juliet.

Rendez-vous earned director Andre Téchiné (Wild Reeds) Best Director honors at the Cannes Film Festival.

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