‘City’ Presents Bright, New Crop of French Films

“City of Lights, City of Angels” offers a dazzling array of new French films, beginning Tuesday and continuing through Saturday at the Directors Guild, 7920 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood. The films’ directors are scheduled to appear at screenings.

The guild, along with the UCLA Film Archive, the Motion Picture Producers Assn. of America, Unifrance and various other organizations, are sponsoring the event.

Gilles Mimouni’s “The Apartment” (Tuesday at 7:30 p.m.) is the kind of go-for-broke first feature from a filmmaker who can’t be told “it can’t be done.” A young Paris businessman (Vincent Cassel) is headed to Tokyo to cement a merger of his firm with a Japanese company when he glimpses his lost love (Monica Belluci) in a telephone booth. A fragment of her overheard conversation plunges him into a “Vertigo”-like adventure of romance and suspense in which love and fate interplay in a plot that is probably too convoluted for its own good. However, the combination of Mimouni’s breathtaking assurance and dazzling style is so exhilarating you don’t worry too much if you’re not sure what’s going on.

“Nenette et Boni” (Wednesday at 7:30 p.m.) is a remarkably acute, intimate study of an intense young Marseille pizza chef (Gregoire Colin) and his pregnant sister (Alice Houri), also a strong personality, who find themselves confronted with mutual attraction. “Nenette and Boni” was directed and co-written by Claire Denis, who is able to illuminate her people from within. Denis won international acclaim with her 1988 debut film “Chocolat” and has gone on to establish herself as one of France’s foremost filmmakers.

Claude Lelouch has hit a career highlight with “Men, Women: User’s Manual” (Friday at 7:30 p.m.) in which two very different men, a ruggedly handsome business tycoon in the prime of life (Bernard Tapie) and a would-be actor (Fabrice Luchini) who’s become an undercover policeman “because you get better parts,” cross paths when they await the results of tests for cancer. At this point Lelouch, his sweepingly romantic fatalism intact, pulls a switch that allows him to evoke an array of unexpected meanings and emotions. This could well be the best film of Lelouch’s long career, launched with “A Man and a Woman” over 30 years ago.

Bertrand Tavernier’s “Captain Conan” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) is also one of his finest, a richly complex and challenging companion film to his superb 1989 “Life and Nothing But.” Once again Tavernier and his co-writer Jean Cosmos, working from Roger Vercel’s 1934 novel, probe World War I to discover fresh and subtle ways of revealing the tragic and absurd toll of battle.

The gist of their masterful accomplishment is to point up how tough it can be to stop a war machine once it’s going full blast, as French troops linger in the Balkans continuing to fight nine months after the Armistice. (There are implications for present-day conflicts in that region, to be sure.) The issues of class and friendship also come into focus as two men, the humane Lt. Norbert (Samuel Le Bihan) and the brutal Capt. Conan (Philippe Torreton) form an unexpected bond; Le Bihan and Torreton both give towering portrayals. Sandrine Veysset’s “Will There Be Snow for Christmas” (Saturday at 2:30 p.m.) is a paean to mother love, but it’s hard to take. The heroine is a wonderful mother (Dominique Raymond), devoted and resourceful, but why does she go on having children by her married lover, an overbearing farmer who treats her and their seven children like indentured servants? She can’t even get him to come across with an indoor toilet for her bleak stone farmhouse.

Also screening (Thursday at 7:30 p.m.) is Armand Desplechin’s 178-minute “My Sex Life, or How I Got Into That Argument,” a tale of romantic and sexual entanglements among some Parisian Gen-Xers.

An admission-free panel discussion, “New Wave/Next Wave: Issues of Art and Commerce for French Films in the U.S.,” will be held Thursday, from 4:30-6:30 p.m.

Information: (310) 289-2000 or (310) 306-FILM.