Rendez-vous (1985)
Directed by André Téchiné
Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.
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What critics compared Rendez-vous to
And Assayas’s casting adds layers of meta-textual nostalgia (he co-wrote Binoche’s own breakthrough film as a 20-year-old, Rendez-vous) and mischief as Twilight star Stewart makes earnest defence of fantasy blockbusters, and Jo-Ann’s hounding by the press mirrors Stewart’s own.
That Assayas has chosen to do it with Juliette Binoche as his star represents a return to a creative collaboration the filmmaker and actress began nearly three decades ago in "Rendez-vous."
Juliette Binoche is at the peak of her powers in an autobiographically inflected role created for her by Olivier Assayas, co-writer of Rendez-vous, which helped kick-start her screen career in the mid-80s.
And didn’t Juliette Binoche, who plays Maria, get her breakthrough with Rendez-Vous, written by Assayas?
Assayas had helped catapult Binoche to French film stardom by co-writing the fluid, jolting erotic melodrama Rendez-vous (85), in which she played a hyper-sexualized gamine.
(More meta-ness: Assayas wrote André Téchiné’s 1985 film Rendez-vous, which was one of Binoche’s earliest starring roles.)
Favoring leatherette minis accompanied by four-inch heels or the thigh-high boots she’s seen struggling her way out of—viewers of Bastards (2013) will recall that Denis is singularly attentive to shoes—Isabelle is perhaps Binoche’s most purely carnal role since that of the bed-hopping Nina in André Téchiné’s Rendez-vous (1985), though the nature of the need that she exudes here, playing a woman some 30 years older, is very different, if no less urgent.