The invited guests in “Unforgivable” include a goatish old French writer, Francis (André Dussollier); his new wife, Judith (Carole Bouquet), a bisexual former model; her ex-lover, Anna Maria (Adriana Asti), a private detective whose son, Jérémie (Mauro Conte), has just been released from prison; and Francis’s flighty daughter, Alice (Mélanie Thierry), who abandons her husband and daughter to run off with Alvise (Andrea Pergolesi), a handsome heroin-dealing aristocrat. The action takes place in the world’s most ravishing decaying city, Venice, and the surface of the movie is as smooth as the placid canals. The scenes flow, one to the next, serenely, no matter what crazy things these people are doing. Mr. Téchiné always attends to his viewers’ senses, and little by little the characters’ eccentricities come to seem less strange, as if beauty itself forgave everything.
Mr. Téchiné’s style is perilous — he risks both preciousness and narrative incoherence with every movie — and it took him a while to master it. He is of the generation of French filmmakers that followed the New Wave. In the mid-1960s, when François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette were in full swing as directors, Mr. Téchiné was doing what they had done in their previous lives: writing film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma. After that de rigueur rite of passage he made his first film, “Pauline S’en Va” (“Paulina Is Leaving”), in 1969; it didn’t make much of a stir and never opened in the United States. He waited six years before attempting another feature: that movie, a multigenerational family saga that opened here under the title “French Provincial” (1975), was more successful, both commercially and artistically, but he never did anything quite like it again. His next two films were a moody, florid noir called “Barocco” (1976) and a biopic, “The Brontë Sisters” (1979).
His mature style first steals into view in “Hôtel des Amériques” (1981), which was also the first of six remarkable collaborations with Catherine Deneuve. It’s an odd love story, set in Biarritz, about the relationship between a mysteriously reserved anesthesiologist, played by Ms. Deneuve, and an impulsive, rather neurotic man played by Patrick Dewaere. Everything about their on-again, off-again affair feels tentative, provisional, and nothing much is resolved in the end, but the movie has an imaginative freedom that was new for Mr. Téchiné, a willingness to surprise himself.
And he has continued to make movies in that spirit: the surprises keep coming. He’s now refined the exploratory manner of “Hôtel des Amériques” to the point where it seems capable of refreshing even the most conventional movie forms. “Scene of the Crime” (1986) and “Thieves” are thrillers, of a sort — there are murders, at least, in both — but their suspense has almost nothing to do with the usual questions of who did what and whether they’ll get away with it; they are about how crime affects the relationships of the people involved. A bourgeois family drama like “My Favorite Season” (1993), in which Ms. Deneuve and Daniel Auteuil play a brother and sister whose mother is dying, becomes a meditation on memory’s power to destabilize the present, to unsettle everything that had seemed firmly settled.
Mr. Téchiné likes to keep things fluid, unstable, which is perhaps why his movies are so sympathetic to the dire confusions of youth. All his pictures feature troubled adolescents and twentysomethings, trying to find a way to be themselves, their faces serious, clouded with uncertainty. Jérémie, in “Unforgivable,” has that look. So does Jeanne (Émilie Dequenne), the young protagonist of “The Girl on the Train,” who glides on her Rollerblades around Paris, searching for a job in a desultory way and falling into an affair in more or less the same manner, and eventually, for no apparent reason, telling a big, public lie just to announce that she exists. Mr. Téchiné doesn’t presume to justify her, or even to explain her, but the movie leaves little doubt that he’s on her side.
His best film, “Wild Reeds,” is, not surprisingly, a coming-of-age story, set in a provincial boarding school in the early ’60s, when France’s colonial domination of Algeria was, after long struggle, coming to its agonizing end. It’s a Téchiné kind of moment in history, when a relationship is in flux, on its way to becoming something else. The kids in “Wild Reeds” — one of them a French Algerian — are trying to sort out their political feelings, their hopes for the future and their sexuality, all at the same time, and although the film has a sunlit grace and ease, Mr. Téchiné gives their problems the weight they deserve.
And he respects the weird randomness of teenage moods. There’s a lovely scene in a cafe in which a boy who has just discovered that he’s gay tells his consequential secret to his best friend, a serious girl who loves him. For a minute or so she ponders, glumly, the import of this revelation; and then “Barbara Ann,” by the Beach Boys, starts up on the jukebox, and they begin, spontaneously, to dance. Her smile, as she bops around, is huge, unforced, radiant; just like that, she’s been possessed by pure joy.
A few years ago Mr. Téchiné made a lovely romantic comedy called “Changing Times,” a title that could serve for any of his films. Its hero and heroine, Gérard Depardieu and (inevitably) Ms. Deneuve, are old flames who meet again, years later, in Morocco and wonder if they can reconnect in the new world around them. They’re as puzzled and awkward as teenagers, and that makes them, in Mr. Téchiné’s view, alive in the best way.
It’s not 1962, but the changing times we live in now are his kind of moment too. Everything’s up in the air, all the old ideas about race, gender, sexuality, political and economic alignments. And that disorder, his movies suggest, is really a more natural order, nothing to be afraid of: if you can improvise a little, go with the flow of history, there are pleasures to be had. That’s why he’s been inviting us in, one by one, for all these years. He has always been a wonderful director; he now seems an invaluable one. His time has come — out of the blue, like a good song on the jukebox.
