Director Andre Techine picked up Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival for this superficial slice of Gallic miserablism.

To put this in context, 1985 also saw the release of Kurosawa’s Ran, a film not even in competition at Cannes.

An adolescent tale of a bizarre ménage-a-trois centred on the boyishly attractive Binoche, this has the queen of French cinema as Nina, a wannabe actress torn between Wilson’s Quentin, a tortured actor, and Stanczak’s Paulo, a timid estate agent.

Nina jumps into bed with Quentin, claiming she loves Paulo too much to sleep with him. Understandably miffed, Paulo rejects Nina, and when Quentin terminally exits stage left she finds solace in a production of Romeo and Juliet.

Anguish and art are troweled on thick in Rendez-vous, but any insights into the terrors of performance or commitment are sophomoric and the complete vacuum of humour actually has a strange aging effect on whoever watches it.

Even a poster for Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life is used to make a morose point.

Binoche gamely gets her kit off whenever the film threatens to derail, but is not yet the formidable tour de force she would become by the decade’s end.

French legend Jean-Louis Trintignant has an extended cameo as Nina’s theatre director with grief of his own, but no amount of pedigree can rescue this.

Co-writer Olivier Assayas would go on to direct the first class Irma Vep and become Mr Maggie Cheung for a short time.

Rob Daniel