French vanilla It’s an off year for the Gallic Film Fest at the MFA BY PETER KEOUGH

The French have had a rough go of it lately, being vilified and scapegoated because of their position on Iraq. What better way for them to strike back than through the medium they’ve mastered, cinema? Alas, if this year’s Boston French Film Festival is any indication, their film industry seems about to capitulate to the same standards of mainstream mediocrity that have overwhelmed their American counterparts.

Well, not entirely. From veteran filmmaker Pascal Bonitzer comes Petites coupures/Small Cuts 2003; July 11 at 6 p.m. and July 19 at 5 p.m.), which provides the kind of perverse moral ambiguity and nihilistic joie de vivre one expects from the French. It opens with a witty illustration of a Marxist notion of private property. Young Nathalie (Ludivine Sagnier), off to a date with diehard Communist-newspaper journalist Bruno (Daniel Auteuil), notices a stranger using her brand of lipstick. She asks to borrow it and learns that it is, in fact, her own lipstick, that she left it in Bruno’s bathroom, and that the woman using it is Gaëlle (Emmanuelle Devos), Bruno’s wife.

Just the beginning of a bad day for Nathalie, not to mention Bruno. They visit Bruno’s uncle Gérard (Jean Yanne), who lives near Grenoble; there Nathalie overhears an unfortunate conversation and deserts Bruno, even as Gérard is asking him to take a message to the man who’s having an affair with Gérard’s wife, Anne (Catherine Mouchet). Getting lost in Bonitzer’s dark wood, Bruno bumps into a series of desperate and insane women (including Kristin Scott Thomas as Béatrice) who seduce him and lead him astray, each liaison ending with the small but increasingly larger cuts of the title. Auteuil brings to the role a perfect blend of vanity and self-loathing, and until the anticlimactic ending, Bonitzer balances the flamboyance of Bertrand Blier with the icy absurdity of Luis Buñuel.

Almost capitalizing on its promising title is Anne Fontaine’s Comment j’ai tué mon père/How I Killed My Father (2000; July 12 at 6:25 p.m. and July 24 at 4 p.m.), a dour and icy look at Oedipal woes. Spectral Charles Berling plays Jean-Luc, a doctor who’s made his fortune selling human growth hormone, Botox, and other snake oil to the aging bourgeoisie in Versailles. Like Bruno, he’s racked by self-loathing, not because he clings to a defeated ideology but because he’s become so successful exploiting the victorious one. His disgust with his empty wealth and trophy wife (Natacha Régnier) comes to the fore when his father (Michel Bouquet), who abandoned the family long ago to serve as a missionary doctor in Africa, returns with sinister intentions. A brisk critique of bourgeois materialism and a chilling look at the ambivalence of fatherhood, it’s an entertaining little melodrama nonetheless.

Approaching the discontents of the family man from a different direction is Nicole Garcia’s L’adversaire/The Adversary (2002; July 20 at 12:30 p.m. and July 26 at 2:30 p.m.). Self-loathing still intact but with none of the carefree nihilism that put a spring in his step in Petites coupures, Daniel Auteuil returns as Jean-Marc, a seemingly respectable husband and father of two who responds badly when people start to suspect that he isn’t what he appears to be. Based on the same true story that inspired Laurent Cantet’s more austere and powerful L’emploi du temps/Time Out (2001), Garcia’s version explores the gray areas of memory and identity with its sinuous chronology but in the end succumbs to generic expectations.

Yet another spin on the father/son relationship underlies Olivier Ducastel & Jacques Martineau’s Ma vraie vie à Rouen/My Life on Ice (2002; July 17 at 8 p.m.), in which a teenage aspiring figure skater discovers his more than filial feelings for his stepfather while making a video diary of his "year of love." The film begins with typical self-conscious, adolescent banality, but in the background and between the stagy scenes a different story unfolds, one of secret desire, unspoken despair, and unlikely triumph. Reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami and harking back to the New Wave’s exploitation of new technology for æsthetic breakthroughs, it is this festival’s most pleasant surprise.

Ellipses and indirection also tell the tale in Julie Lopes-Curval’s Bord de mer/Seaside (2002; July 12 at 12:30 p.m. and July 25 at 6 p.m.). Over the course of four seasons at a down-and-out resort at the mouth of the Somme, local residents and holiday visitors enact bittersweet dramas reflective of larger patterns — economic, existential, mythic. The central metaphor is the town’s pebble plant, where the poor women work at the Sisyphean task of sorting an endless conveyer belt of stones while dreaming of the plush lives of their bosses and betters — who are, of course, even less happy than they are. It’s well-crafted but saccharine — compared with a classic like Eric Rohmer’s Pauline à la plage/Pauline at the Beach, Bord de mer is cinema at ebbtide.

Zabou Breitman’s Se souvenir des belles choses/Try To Remember (2002; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival July 13 at 7 p.m. and July 17 at 2 p.m.) also demonstrates genuine talent and subtle insights before surrendering to bromides. Pretty Claire (Isabelle Carré) seems to have lost some of her memory after being struck by lightning. Or is she suffering from the same Alzheimer’s disease that claimed her mother? Salty Dr. Licht (Bernard Lecoq) is trying to sort this out at his clinic for memory disorders, where Claire is a patient, but meanwhile she’s fallen for hangdog fellow inmate Philippe (Bernard Campan), who’s suffering from hysterical amnesia after a car crash killed his family. Until falling into the pit of bathos that such a premise inevitably entails, Se souvenir des belles choses engages in some thoughtful repartee on the nature of language, memory, love, and individuality.

Not all the filmmakers here aspire to small successes. The press notes for Lucas Belvaux’s Trilogie compare it to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Trois couleurs trilogy and Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon. Having seen only the concluding installment, Après la vie/After Life (2002; July 13 at 4:30 p.m.), I couldn’t say for sure. It’s a solid policier in which Belvaux (who looks a little like George Clooney) plays a cop who’s having a hard time keeping his addicted wife in morphine while hunting down a murderous terrorist. The story seems to collapse into coincidence and implausibility about halfway through, but this trilogy is interconnecting, so perhaps the narrative loopholes are filled in by the first two films — the first of which, Cavale/On the Run (2002; July 13 at 12:15 p.m.), seems to be a political thriller and the second, Un couple épanant/An Amazing Couple (2002; July 13 at 2:30 p.m.), a musical about hypochondria.

Time, I would say, to get back to what the French do best: sex! Or at least used to. Despite its title, Patrice Leconte’s Rue des plaisirs (2002; July 18 at 8:15 p.m. and July 26 at 7:15 p.m.) is a largely joyless period picture about a Monsieur Hire–like brothel attendant (Patrick Timsit) in the ’30s and ’40s whose vicarious love for a beautiful whore (Laetitia Casta) compels him to abet her amour with a worthless man. Despite the flouncy frame-tale narrative, the voyeuristic subtext, and the rich atmospherics, Rue is a dead end.

Then there’s Jean-Claude Brisseau’s Choses secrètes/Secret Things (2002; July 20 at 7 p.m. and July 25 at 7:45 p.m.). What a hoot! This is both the best and the worst film of the festival by a filmmaker who’s the Gallic equivalent of Brian De Palma. Two gorgeous women (Sabrina Seyvecou and Coralie Revel) who’ve been canned from their jobs at a strip club (apparently masturbating in front of the audience was too demure) vow to beat the system. The way to empowerment involves the following steps: 1) masturbating in public; 2) applying as secretaries at a large corporation; 3) seducing the firm’s sadistic CEO, who as a child was transformed into a soulless übermensch after spending three weeks with the decomposing corpse of his mother; and 4) — this step is optional — setting oneself on fire.

Brisseau is clearly nuts, but there’s a certain glory to his candlelit tableaux reminiscent of Symbolist paintings exploding into absurd ecstasy with a surging Magnificat on the soundtrack. It’s as if Catherine Breillat had taken the English title of her new Scènes intimes/Sex Is Comedy (2002; July 26 at 9 p.m.) seriously. Maybe she did; I decided to avoid a movie titled Sex Is Comedy by a filmmaker who knows nothing about either.

And then we come to French cinema at its most irredeemable. Lucky for Marguerite Duras, novelist and director of such stern French fare as India Song (1975), that she did not live to see Josée Dayan’s Cet amour-là (2001; July 20 at 3 p.m.), an adaptation of an autobiographical novel written by Yann Andrea, who was Duras’s much younger (she was 65; here, played by Aymeric Demarigny, he looks about 12) lover and virtual slave for the last hundred years or so years of her life.

The same can’t be said for Jeanne Moreau, that great treasure of French cinema, who here puts in her worst performance ever as Duras. Mawkish, pretentious, and pretty near unwatchable, the film achieves the dubious feat of dragging a great artist down to the ranks of mediocrity. To judge from this festival, it’s a direction that the rest of French cinema might be following.