Essay on RENDEZ-VOUS for Reverse Shot's ‘Binoche Auteur’ Symposium, July 2019

“An apparent ingénue and flibbertigibbet, she is flighty, reckless, preyed upon, and vulnerable, but so utterly mesmeric—and, it must be said, manipulative—as to drive all the principal men in the film literally mad. Quentin commits suicide; Paulot and Scrutzler have a long fight in the rain; Paulot’s own descent into madness takes the form of an attempted lurch into machismo, followed by a corrective retreat into childhood pain and fear.”

I wrote about Juliette Binoche’s gobsmacking debut in Andre Techine’s (and Olivier Assayas’s) RENDEZ-VOUS over at Reverse Shot