Please don't spend money on this.

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

Brilliant Andre Techine film, erotic, romantic, with feminist themes, and absolutely outstanding acting performances by the entire cast.Juliette Binoche had her first important role in this movie, and she shows the promise that she has kept: she plays pretty much all of the different personas she has played throughout her career in this one film! She is sexy, elfin, a "free spirit", confused, afraid...she deservedly got her first Cesar nomination (Best Actress) for this role, losing to Sandrine Bonnaire of Agnes Varda's "Vagabond".Wadeck Stanczak won the Cesar award for "most promising male newcomer" for his role as the somewhat shy lovesick Paolot. His is the male lead role in the film. I have never seen him in anything else; this often happens with the "most promising actor" Cesar winners. His name seems polish to me? Very handsome and very likable.Lambert Wilson is smoldering in his intense and driven performance as Quentin. His is really a supporting role despite his receiving his first Cesar nomination for this role (losing, inexplicably, to Christophe Lambert of "Subway"). I have always loved Lambert Wilson, even if I haven't loved the films he has been in (my favorite: "Private Fears in Public Places"). This movie came out 28 years ago and he is still smoldering and sexy today! (Does Quentin commit suicide or is it an accident?) Jean-Louis Trintignant doesn't show up until late in the film but he is his usual brilliant self as an older man who brings out the jealousy in Paolot.Andre Techine brings out so much in his actors in all of his films. He has a gay sensibility, even when all the characters are straight.Absolutely worth seeing!

I must confess to a certain prejudice. I've never been to France, and my only experience of the French people is through movies. Consequently, I have been conditioned to love French women and hate French men. This film is a rich tapestry of weak and repulsive characters--particularly the "men." The arrogant egomaniac "Quentin," played by Lambert Wilson, is so sociopathic, annoying, and chauvinistic that when he is flattened by an auto early in the film, I felt like cheering. But alas! He comes back as a ghost, to haunt poor helpless cute little Nina (Binoche), who has been charmed out of her knickers by this abominable and sadistic Romeo. The other "man" that attracts Nina's interest is a wimpy and whiny lovelorn real-estate agent, played by Wadeck Stanczak, whose masculinity is pre-pubescent. Another inexplicable male character is an older "man," a director in the theater, who worships Quentin, even though Quentin-Romeo irresponsibly killed off his own daughter (who was playing Juliet) in a car wreck. This director also sees something very promising in Juliette's abysmal audition to play Juliet in his new production of the play, presumably because she reminds him of his own daughter and is also infatuated somehow with God's gift to the stage, talented Romeo-Quentin. On the plus side, the film does afford us a fleeting glimpse of "Binoche's binush," (as a previous commenter perceptively observed), and therefore earned the two stars of my rating. To be sure, the "binush" in question looks very much like other binushes the world over, but the fact that it is revealed by one destined for future stardom seems to give it special significance.

Rendez-vous (1985) was co-written and directed by André Téchiné. It's a vehicle for the now-famous Juliette Binoche.Juliette Binoche, at age 21, already radiated the star power that became apparent to everyone in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Unfortunately, her contributions to this film were pretty much limited to her luminous skin and her distinctive beauty. This distinctive beauty is fully and totally displayed. (Binoche is not shy.)The film involves four men who swirl around Binoche like the proverbial moths around a flame. One is a wimp, one is a creep, and one carries a straight razor. (Don't ask). The fourth is Jean-Louis Trintignant. The other three were all young, and were probably happy to work with a well-known director like Téchiné. One can only guess why an established star like Trintignant accepted this role. Binoche is lovely, especially when dressed in period costume as Shakespeare's Juliet. (She looks like Vivian Leigh in "Gone with the Wind.") However, she is miscast as the wide-eyed young ingénue from the provincial town of Toulouse. Binoche was born in Paris, and she just can't carry off a role in which she is supposed to have just arrived in town to "live her life." Another weak point is her reading of some of Juliet's lines at an casting audition. No actor could read lines that badly. (High school kids trying out for the senior play don't read lines that badly.)The movie will work well on DVD, which is the way I saw it. If you love La Binoche, and you've seen every other film in which she's starred, I guess you'll have to see this one for the sake of completion. If you haven't seen all of her later films, rent one of those instead.

Juliette Binoche was only 21 when she made this film, but it was her eighth film. This is really a pointless, offensive, and ridiculous film for which the director was of course awarded Best Director at Cannes, and Binoche was awarded a Best Actress Cesar (which proves how crazy judges can be, and how perverted they are as well). I imagine Juliette Binoche must be hideously embarrassed to think this terrible film of her cavorting around naked in compromising situations is still available on DVD. It is harder than soft porn, and purely gratuitous in its graphic displays. Binoche was not at all interesting at the age of 21, and all of her fascinating qualities developed later when she began to look like a woman: as a girl, she was seriously dull. I do not mean to say that Binoche did a bad job of acting; on the contrary, she did very well, but why bother? This film is a wet dream fantasy of a sick director of the 'let's get the lead actress's kit off quick' school of thought. Everybody in the film is obsessed with sex, death, and all those really new things none of us has ever thought about, so we need the wacko director to remind us. Why didn't he just make a sexy vampire film and be less affected and pompous? If you want horror, death, and sex, there are always vampires to turn to. Instead, we have here a lot of twaddle about Shakespeare and other mock-profundities. How absurd this all is. Binoche ought to get her kit back on. Really, there was no point in taking it off. On the other hand, there is a Cesar for the mantlepiece, I suppose. But was it worth it? This is a film only for psychotics.