" What’s worth filming here? " someone asks a man with a camera in Jean-Pierre Améris’s C’est la vie (2001; July 28 at 4 p.m., with the director present), one of the highlights of this year’s Boston French Film Festival. " A birthday party, " he’s told. " A man telling a joke. " In short, the quotidian substance of experience, the kind of material French cinema has been working with since the Lumière Brothers screened L’arrivée d’un train en gare de la Ciotat in 1895. If you prefer formula to reality, there’s always Hollywood. But even when the French do genre, as they do with increasing frequency these days, for better or worse, they keep it real.

For the most part. Even C’est la vie threatens to turn into a typical Tinseltown tearjerker, and one can see Disney picking up the rights and casting Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks in the lead roles. For the time being, however, we have Sandrine Bonnaire as Suzanne, a volunteer worker in a hospice for the terminally ill, and gaunt Jacques Dutronc as Dimitri, a recent client who looks as if he didn’t have much time left. So it’s more about la mort than la vie, though such a death sentence can intensify the everyday into an epiphany — or a cliché. The former prevails here, the scene where Dimitri comforts a dying girl with a shaved head recalling Max von Sydow with the doomed witch in The Seventh Seal. The film is haunting, devastating, and only rarely false.

Unlike Étienne Chatiliez’s opening-night entry Tanguy (2001; tonight, July 11, at 7:45 p.m. and also July 20 at 1:45 p.m.), in which a man resists not dying but growing up. Eric Berger looks like a big bespectacled baby in the title role, a thirtysomething pursuing degrees in Asian languages who has settled comfortably and immovably into his parents’ home (their art-gilded apartment is the nicest thing in the movie). Mild irritation gives way to broad and dubious comedy as mom (a shamelessly mugging Sabine Azema) and dad (André Dussollier) plot increasingly sadistic ways to drive away the pest.

No such luck for the parents of Roberto Succo (2001; July 25 at 7:45 p.m.), Cédric Kahn’s grim and pointless account of the real-life criminal career of the title sociopath (Stefano Cassetti), who murdered his parents in Venice at the age of 19 and then took his murderous neediness on a tour of Europe. He meets teenage Léa (Isild Le Besco) in the south of France, and their merging of dysfunctions suggests a romp along the lines of Bonnie and Clyde or Badlands. Instead, the affair amounts to nothing of consequence, and Succo’s spree of killings, rapes, kidnappings, and whiny rudeness continues, achieving focus only through Cassetti’s hypnotic stare.

The recent mom in Dominique Cabréra’s Le lait de la tendresse humaine ( " The Milk of Human Kindness " ; 2001; July 14 at noon and July 28 at 11 a.m.) seems to have a foreboding of the fates of the parents in the previous two films. Christelle (Maryline Canto) panics when she thinks she’s drowned her newborn son, her third child. She flees to her neighbor Claire (Dominique Blanc), whom she barely knows, and withdraws into an infantile state. Her defection begins a social unraveling that extends beyond her immediate family to friends and strangers alike. Cabréra captures with compelling grace the sunny anomie of suburbia, and the sudden vertigo of seeing one’s future, fixed and futile, flash before one’s eyes.

In general, though, the women make out better than the men in these films. Sandrine (Mathilde Seigner), the title character in Christian Carion’s Une hirondelle a fait le printemps ( " The Girl from Paris " ; 2000; July 26 at 8 p.m. and July 27 at 3:30 p.m.), gives up her computer job and her boyfriend to take over a goat farm in the mountains. The owner, Adrien (Michel Serrault), is part of the deal, and he’s an old goat himself, a curmudgeon sure that Sandrine won’t prove tough enough to survive the winter. I see an American remake with, say, Sandra Bullock and Richard Dreyfuss. Carion, meanwhile, roots the odd-couple formula in the palpable details of the setting and renders the predictable emotional payoffs with subtlety and poignancy.

Someone who’s been making Hollywood-like movies for a while is Claude Chabrol, and he confects another bitter Hitchcockian bonbon with Merci pour le chocolat (2000; July 20 at 3:45 p.m.). Isabelle Huppert brings a striking lack of affect to Muller chocolate-fortune heiress Mika, who’s marrying the renowned pianist André Polonski (Jacques Dutronc, looking little recovered from C’est la vie) for the second time. Their first marriage ended 18 years ago when André strayed off and wed Lisbeth, who later died in a mysterious accident. As if that weren’t complicated enough, shortly after the remarriage, the lovely piano student Jeanne (Anna Mouglalis) drops by the chalet to suggest that she might be André’s daughter, switched at birth with his son Guillaume (Rodolphe Pauly).

So why isn’t this enough to explain the business with the hot chocolate, a plot device straight out of The Count of Monte Cristo? Although psychology loses out to narrative convolutions, Chabrol’s icy compositions and cutting chill the blood, right down to the long, final close-up of Huppert’s tear-streaked face.

Nonetheless, he’s got some stiff competition in the suspense genre from upstart Jacques Audiard, whose Sur mes lèvres ( " Read My Lips " ; 2001; July 14 at 7:15 p.m.) jolts the screen like one of the master’s best. Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is a bright woman working as a secretary in a construction firm, but she’s handicapped by her hearing impairment (shades of Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men), her plain looks, her low self-esteem, and her gender. The guys in the office abuse her until she hires Paul (Vincent Cassel) as her assistant. An ex-con with a bad haircut, Paul is someone Carla has power over, and he represents a little extra-legal muscle to help get her way — not to mention fodder for her fetishistic fantasies. Before you can say it’s makeover or payback time, the arrangement escalates into a heist. Resisting all temptation to cop out, Audiard maintains a diabolical tension and ambiguity until the end (I foresee a Hollywood version devoid of those qualities starring Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt).

Difficult though Paul may be, he’s less of a handful than Bobby Vohler, the late belle-lettriste chased down by his would-be biographer (pixie-ish Jeanne Balibar) in Mathieu Amalric’s Le stade de Wimbledon ( " Wimbledon Stadium " ; 2001; July 18 at 6 p.m. and July 28 at 6 p.m.). Not only is Bobby dead, but he didn’t make much of an impression while he was alive, since he was a writer who didn’t write. His biographer tracks down the clues to his silence, interviewing acquaintances from Trieste to the English town of the title. Trying to do too much, or too little, this first film by the actor Amalric consists largely of voiceovers in train stations and hotel rooms.

Balibar nonetheless has more luck with her writer than does Chantal Akerman with Proust in her loose adaptation of La captive (2000; July 13 at 1:45 p.m. and July 18 at 7:45 p.m.). This volume of À la recherche du temps perdu chronicles with relentless nuance an obsessive, sadistic, hopeless love; Akerman eliminates Proust’s psychology and language, his insights into the nature of memory, transience, mortality, and desire, and replaces them with tepid feminism and cinematography reminiscent of Emmanuelle.

Another icon of French literature takes a beating in Benoît Jacquot’s Sade (2000; July 20 at 7 p.m.). Daniel Auteuil plays the 50-year-old marquis, who’s in prison along with other aristocrats awaiting the judgment of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety. Sade brightens the days by putting on masques (a prelude to Charenton?), chiding his mistress about her affair with a Jacobin minister even though it’s the only thing that’s keeping him alive, and flirting with nubile Émilie (Isild Le Besco, apparently looking for more rough trade after Roberto Succo).

But their relationship is surprisingly platonic (okay, there is that weird threesome in the barn with the gardener). He’s her mentor, and his lesson is that you should live for today, since tomorrow you may be one of the headless corpses stinking in the lime pits. Call him the happy Sade, and could Robin Williams be available for the Touchstone version? (If you’d like to see Jacquot unleash some genuine sado-masochism, check out the austere opulence of his 2001 adaptation of Puccini’s Tosca, which screens July 21 at 3:15 p.m.)

Two of the greatest living filmmakers round out the festival. One is the nonagenarian Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira, whose Je rentre la maison ( " I’m Going Home " ; 2001; July 21 at 7:15 p.m.) is a luminous and baffling homage to art and life and the aching fragility of it all. Gilbert Valence (Michel Piccoli) returns backstage after a performance in Ionesco’s Exit the King to find out that his wife, daughter, and son-in-law have been wiped out in a car crash. Only his grandson remains. But rather than focusing on the cute little tyke, Oliveira contents himself with enigmatic close-ups of Gilbert’s new tan shoes. Gilbert takes some time off, but after a spin as Prospero in The Tempest, he’s looking for work. In a masterpiece of excruciating miscasting, he’s put in the role of Buck Mulligan by an American director (John Malkovich) who’s adapting James Joyce’s Ulysses for the screen.

Shades of Contempt. And speaking of Jean-Luc Godard: does anybody know what the hell he’s been talking about for the past 40 years? (If you do, or you don’t care, the next step is Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering’s puckish 2001 documentary Derrida, which screens July 28 at 12:45 p.m.). Godard’s collaboration with Anne-Marie Miéville, The Old Place (2001; screens July 20 at 5:30 p.m. and July 27 at noon.) is more of the same, a collage of text and image that stimulates and bewilders and may be this year’s most exhilarating 49 minutes of cinema. And I guarantee there will be no Hollywood remake, though, come to think of it, Clint Eastwood as Jean-Luc and Helen Hunt as Anne-Marie might be worth looking into.