Rendez-Vous

Future star Juliette Binoche made a sensational early splash in Andre Techine's 1985 Rendez-voux, one of the director's typically unpredictable projects. Binoche plays a struggling actress whose new Paris apartment brings her into the orbit of the meek realtor (Wadeck Stanczack) who found the place and his aggressively dashing roommate (Lambert Wilson). There's also a grizzled director (the great Jean-Louis Trintignant) looking to cast Romeo and Juliet. Techine wrote this sexually explosive movie with Olivier Assayas (Late August, Early September), which might help explain its fluid, dreamy forward motion; nothing happens according to realistic logic, but it seems to make sense as it hurtles along. The following year Techine made Scene of the Crime, which established him as a major French director. Binoche's live-wire performance is an indication of the risk-taking that was to come, and here she is already one of the most beautiful women in cinema. --Robert Horton