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What awaits the girls in Innocence when they finally leave the mysterious school? Maybe an unwanted pregnancy like that of Claire (Lola Naymark) in Éléonore Faucher’s auspicious debut, Brodeuses/Sequins (2004; July 9 at 6:30 pm). To avoid scandal, Claire leaves her job at the supermarket and heads back to her rural home town to work with Madame Mélikian (Ariane Ascaride) stitching embroidery for Paris designers. An ideal solution, except that her boss is grieving the loss of her son in an auto accident caused by a local boy with whom Claire falls in love. Meanwhile, her belly is getting bigger, and Claire dreads the day she’ll have to give up the baby for adoption. Faucher shows restraint (though the Vermeer-like photography perhaps over-embroiders the film), transforming these melodramatic elements into a limpid parable of two mothers, one bereaved of the past, the other of the future.

Whatever the destination of the innocents in Innocence, let’s hope they have better company than the pair of dull initiates in Emmanuel Mouret’s Vénus et Fleur/Vénus and Fleur (2003; July 15 at 6 pm and July 23 at 12:30 pm). Timid, tubby Fleur (Isabelle Pirès) looks forward to a dull vacation at her uncle’s Marseilles chateau until, through the device of exchanged pocketbooks, she hooks up with insufferable, hot-to-trot Russian visitor Vénus (Veroushka Knoge). Vénus is boy-crazy, and Fleur idolizes her spontaneity, her ability to live in the moment and her past of (presumed) suffering in her benighted homeland. When a boy comes between them, though, they start to recognize the truth: Vénus is annoying and Fleur is a bore.

Perhaps Fleur might grow up to be like Natacha (Ariane Ascaride) in Robert Guédiguian’s Mon père est ingénieur/My Father Is an Engineer (2004; July 9 at 2:45 pm), which is also set in Marseilles. Natacha starts out in a mute, catatonic state, and it’s a pity she doesn’t remain that way. Instead, her former flame Jérémie (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), a physician disillusioned with the politics involved in saving the world’s poor, tries to learn the reasons for her malady — and also relive his on-and-ultimately-off relationship with her. Turns out that Natacha is also a doctor, but unlike Jérémie, she remained in her home town to serve the multicultural poor there, dispensing bad advice along with her services. A Romeo-and-Juliet-like pair of 13-year-olds, the girl French and the boy Arab, ask her for help when their parents don’t approve and the girl gets pregnant. Natacha’s solution: let them get married and have the baby. Why couldn’t have she have given the kids condoms before it was too late? Her crusade leads to her come-uppance, and it’s hard to be sympathetic. Told in a farrago of flashbacks and including a treacly rendition of the Nativity story as a linking text, the film confirms Guédiguian as the most overrated of French directors.

André Téchiné takes a similar story and gets it right in Les temps qui changent/Changing Times (2004; July 17 at 8 pm; co-presented by the Boston Jewish Film Festival). Deneuve returns as Cécile, here a less regal discontented spouse. She lives in Tangier with her younger husband, Nathan (Gilbert Melki), a native-born Jewish doctor who likes to swim in the pool and has drinks before his first appointment at 11 am. Cécile gets some satisfaction, if little pay, from her job as a host of a radio show playing song dedications for wayward lovers, and that’s how old flame Antoine (Gerárd Depardieu) tracks her down. A wealthy building contractor, Antoine is in town to supervise the construction of a local media center, but what he really wants is to retrieve his old love. Depardieu puts in a touching, comic turn as the persevering romantic (his first re-encounter with Cécile is a classic of humiliation), and Téchiné orchestrates the chronology and performances in a funny, moving depiction of the triumph of love over time.

Fanny Ardant hooks up with Depardieu in Anne Fontaine’s slow-starting but ultimately powerful Nathalie . . . (2003; July 24 at 8 pm). Catherine’s problem is nothing new, as her hypochondriac mother reminds her: husband Bernard cheats on her incessantly. Her solution is to hire high-class hooker Marlène (Emmanuelle Béart) and have her establish a relationship with Bernard and then report all the details. Perhaps Catherine is seeking to refire their initial passion, but what we get is a twisted triangle of voyeurism, deception, and power that Freud might define as sado-masochistic. It reminded me of an unchaste version of Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love. Fontaine established her talent for the perversity and tenderness of relationships with her previous film, Comme j’ai tué mon père/How I Killed My Father; here she extends her insight into desire and rage and their reconciliation.

Tom (Romain Duris), the protagonist of Jacques Audiard’s brilliant De battre mon cœur s’est arrête/The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2004; July 16 at 7 pm), a remake of James Toback’s 1978 Fingers, also mourns a lost love: playing the piano, a legacy of his deceased mother, herself a concert pianist. Now he works in real estate, a business, as he tells a teacher at an aborted audition, that consists of planting rats in the apartments of unwanted tenants and working over squatters with a baseball bat. That profession is the legacy of his father, an over-the-hill deal maker whose foiled schemes Tom is called on to back up with his muscle. Audiard’s jagged, vérité-like style and Duris’s performance — evoking not so much Harvey Keitel’s in Toback’s film as a combination of the Keitel and Robert De Niro characters in Mean Streets — transcend the story’s absurdities. I remember the original Fingers, which has its passionate defenders, as overwrought and dumb. If so, this is an instance of the past not only retrieved but redeemed.