Once it dreamed of revolution, now it dabbles in social reform. French film has come far since the New Wave, when the overthrow of all institutions, or at least cinematic ones, was on the agenda. Now school lunches and patients’ rights dominate the screen — certainly that’s the impression given by this year’s Boston French Film Festival at the Museum of Fine Arts, which though it has expanded to a record 24 features seems in the process to have lost its edge. Once a celebration of perversity, French film now seems more disposed to pathology and therapy; the subversiveness of Godard and Truffaut has given way to the liberal blandishments of Tom Daschle.

With, of course, significant exceptions. François Ozon could be called a dilettante, he way he changes modes and genres, were he not so chillingly polished. If any strain persists through Criminal Lovers and Water Drops on Burning Rocks, it’s an unapologetic fascination with the twisted. That continues with Under the Sand (Sous le sable, 2000; July 12 at 8 p.m.), though with a tragic, romantic undertone.

Marie (Charlotte Rampling) and Jean (Bruno Cremer) have gone to the beach on vacation. Had they seen Ozon’s short “See the Sea,” they would have known this is a bad idea, and neither do such details as insects swarming under an overturned rock bode well. One fine day Jean goes in for a dip and never returns; the rest of the movie is what another filmmaker would turn into a textbook case of denial. Marie does not acknowledge that Jean is gone, referring to him in the present tense, conversing with his phantasm and even discussing with it her choice of a new lover. Reminiscent at times of an unwhimsical Truly, Madly, Deeply, at others of a humorless Harvey, Sand benefits from Rampling’s exquisite beauty and eloquent grief but suffers from Cremer’s stolid, stocky Jean, who even before he’s presumed dead is a bit of a stiff.

The beauty of Under the Sand is that Ozon doesn’t try to explain anything or offer judgment or suggest a cure. Anne Villacèque isn’t quite so rigorous in Little Darling (Petite chérie, 2000; July 14 at 6:15 p.m. and July 27 at 6 p.m.), but despite some lapses into clichés about middle-class anomie, the film plays like a tart Chabrol thriller edged with Jane Campion–style weirdness. Sybille (Corinne Debonnière) is 30, plain, and repressed, and she lives with her parents in a stretch of tract housing of deadly sameness. While riding home from work on the train, she reads about Prince Charming in her favorite romance novel, and suddenly he’s there, sitting before her. Victor (Jonathan Zaccaï) looks like a parody of a commuter — topcoat, tie, briefcase — but he has no job, no past he’ll speak about, only discontent and the vague ambition to “succeed.” He moves into Sybille’s bland suburban nest; the disruption that ensues is less predictable than it is hauntingly, hilariously surreal.

If conformity and repression are at fault in Little Darling, the opposite might be blamed for the antics of Gender Confusion (La confusion des genres, 2000; July 21 at 7:15 p.m. and July 27 at 8:15 p.m.). Alain (Pascal Greggory) is a barrister whose desires know no law. He agrees to marry his boss, Laurence (Nathalie Richard), who loves him, but he’s also obsessed with Christophe (Cyrille Thouvenin), the teenage brother of an ex-girlfriend, and Marc (Vincent Martinez), the doltish hunk now serving life after Alain unsuccessfully defended him against a murder/robbery charge. Marc makes Alain his messenger boy for his girlfriend, Babette (Julie Gayet), who also catches Alain’s eye . . . It’s a lot to cover in 94 minutes, but director Ilan Duran Cohen keeps the action crisp, rueful, and witty, and Greggory’s craggy good looks and bewildered aplomb arouse sympathy despite one’s better judgment. A latter-day Bertrand Blier sex farce, though with a tagged-on family-values moral.

Alain’s misbehavior is wholesome compared to that in Bernard Rapp’s A Matter of Taste (Une affaire de goût, 2000; July 21 at 5 p.m.). Twentysomething slacker Nicolas (Jean-Pierre Lorit) waits on the table of an especially fussy customer. This turns out to be Frédéric Delamont (Bernard Giraudeau), an eccentric millionaire who offers Alain a job as his “taster.” Delamont’s afraid not of being poisoned but of being alone; he just wants someone to share his experience intimately, or else provide him with experience he can share vicariously. Despite the weirdness and the hostility of his pseudo-radical pals and his girlfriend, Nicolas can’t say no to Frédéric, and the outcome looks grim. And despite the diabolical premise, the film can’t say no to pseudo-psychological explanation, telling the story in flashbacks framed by an investigation headed by no less than Jean-Pierre Léaud, who reverses the roles from his 400 Blows of more than 40 years ago.

Truffaut’s film gets updated to “400 Blow Jobs” in Jean-Pierre Améris’s Bad Company (Mauvaises fréquentations, 1999; July 14 at 8:15 p.m.). Fourteen-year-old Delphine (Maud Forget) is a younger version of the unfortunate Sybille of Little Darling. She too is oppressed by her well-meaning suburban parents; she too seeks true love with a loser (Rimbaud look-alike Robinson Stévenin). Bad Company starts out trite and ends grotesquely, but there are spots in the middle — Delphine’s friendship with wildcat Olivia (Lou Doillon), whose own subplot surpasses the whole of The Invisible Circus, and her tragic misinterpretation of her grandmother’s platitudinous advice — that almost overcome its sour rehash of male pathology.

No bones are made about that pathology in Hélène Angel’s Skin of Man, Heart of Beast (Peau d’homme, cœur de bête, 1999; July 29 at 5 p.m.). All the men are creeps, from Francky (Serge Riaboukine), a cop with a penchant for drink and domestic violence, to his black-sheep brother Coco (Bernard Blancan), whose return after a mysterious 15-year absence arouses suspicion and annoyance. Except from Francky’s charmless younger daughter, who would like to elevate Coco to Boo Radley status. But he turns out to be just another homicidal maniac, no more engaging than the film’s other overwrought, lowlife characters, and the film turns out to be another indulgence in violence with feminist pretensions.

The bad cop in Skin of Man might beg the question, what are our institutions doing to combat such social woes? Law enforcement, education, and medicine all get their due in muckraking films of varying degrees of sermonizing. Of these, Frédéric Schoendoerffer’s Crime Scenes (Scènes de crimes, 2000; July 14 at 4:15 p.m. and July 19 at 6 p.m.) is the most ambiguous and entertaining, harking back to Michael Mann’s overlooked Thomas Harris adaptation Manhunter. A serial killer preying mostly on teen-age blondes terrorizes France, and at first the crime squad assigned to track him down seems as inept as Lieutenant Frank Drebin’s. Gomez (André Dussollier) has been hitting the bottle, and his wife is about to leave him. Fabian (Charles Berling) seems more stable, with a loving pregnant wife, but as the squad gets closer to the culprit, he starts to take on some of the killer’s traits. None of this is new, of course, but like Mann, Schoendoerffer takes the generic conventions and creates from them a cryptic, melancholy beauty.

That’s the kind of thing you’d expect from Bertrand Tavernier — which makes his It All Starts Today (Ça commence aujourd’hui, 1999; July 14 at noon and July 20 at 5:30 p.m.) all the more disappointing. Daniel Lefebvre (Philippe Torreton), son of a miner and director of a kindergarten in France’s depressed Germinal country, is Super Teacher. If he’s not denouncing the mayor for withholding meal tickets for students, he’s browbeating child welfare for dragging its feet on medical check-ups. He’s a pompous, self-righteous ass, and the film, told in pseudo-vérité, is palpably phony — manipulative, formulaic, and pontificating.

The same goes for Patricia Mazuy’s The King’s Daughters (Saint-Cyr, 2000; July 20 at 7:45 p.m. and July 29 at 7 p.m.), essentially the same story set in the 17th century of Louis XIV — maybe it should be called “It All Started Yesterday”? Isabelle Huppert, as Madame de Maintenon, is determined to start a school to empower young women. Then, perhaps realizing that feminism is still three centuries in the future, she takes a right turn and makes the place into a cross between the Loudon and Charenton asylums, an intriguingly kinky concept that Mazuy is determined to keep vaguely self-righteous and dull.

Finally, the medical establishment gets its due with Michel Deville’s La maladie de Sachs (1999; July 15 at 3:15 p.m.). Dr. Sachs (Albert Dupontel) is almost as insufferable as Tavernier’s goody-goody schoolteacher. He makes house calls, for crying out loud. So what’s his malady? It seems his compassion for humanity has turned him into a misanthrope (certainly a misogynist, as nearly all the women in the film are shrews or dying of cancer). He keeps a journal of his sour reflections on the state of things, and so the film is a kind of “Diary of a Country Doctor,” told in brief, repetitive, case-study snippets with little overlying narrative, and with little of Bresson’s grace or beauty.

The episodic format and the pathological point of view are taken to extremes in Austrian Michael Haneke’s acclaimed Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (Code innconu, 2000; July 28 at 3:45 p.m.). This one consists of brief vignettes about a handful of characters in modern Paris — some strangers, though all interconnected in some way — and how their failure to get involved, their failure to communicate or read the “code” of their alienation, sums up what’s wrong with the world today.

To make up for the banality of this premise, Haneke throws the timing of his segments off: he shoots in really long takes, and invariably he’ll cut a scene off abruptly to convey a false sense of significance. Also, he has Juliette Binoche in the cast, so that this becomes a more pretentious version of Chocolat. If Code Unknown is symptomatic of the health of French cinema, the prognosis is not good.

Issue Date: July 5-12, 2001