Rendez-vous Movie Review

Good news for you pervs out there: Juliette Binoche spends virtually the entirety of Rendez-vous buck naked, usually begging for sex from one of two men she's just met. At 20 years old, she may look like a teenage boy, but hey, that's the price of gratuitous nudity.

Rendez-vous begins with aspiring actress Nina (Binoche) fresh off the boat in Paris, where she immediately falls into bed with both real estate clerk Paulot (Wadeck Stanczak) and his in-your-face roommate Quentin (Lambert Wilson). Soon enough, secrecy is put aside and the whole affair becomes a messy conflagration of emotion and raw sexuality.

André Téchiné's wandering story would love to say something about the human condition and the desperation of souls, but Rendez-vous is so wrapped up in its desire to convince you of its overwhelming perversity that it comes off as being more about the desperation of André Téchiné to make a name for himself (something which really still hasn't happened for him after 35 years in the business). Passion simply isn't the same as Binoche running around naked and mounting every guy she comes across. And the film's denoument -- when Nina finally gets a job under a director played by Jean-Louis Trintignant -- is an almost silly and nonsensical departure from the primary story line.

Sex and love -- these are some of the most raw building blocks of the movies. Téchiné's Rendez-vous manages to build a small fort out of them when he should have gone for the castle.