French cinema maintains a particularly close relationship with its musical stars. From Juliette Gréco to Benjamin Biolay, many musicians have stepped in front of the camera in projects that don't appear to be mere promotional vehicles, but rather natural extensions of their artistic aspirations. One of the most recent additions to this tradition is Juliette Armanet, a singer who seems to have developed a taste for acting in recent years, and who finds in Choosing my life The intersection of their talents.

Cine Paradiso (1988) established in the popular imagination a certain way of paying homage to the love of cinema and the experience of seeing it projected in a dark room, but there are other ways of filming cinephilia. Instead of being tear-jerking and excessively nostalgic, it could be exciting and sensitive, a tribute that would reach the heart without renouncing intellectual ambition and narrative daring. One that would exploit the possibilities of cinema as a language and not just the resources of sentimental melodrama. A film, in short, that was more like Cinephiles, by Arnaud Desplechin, which premieres on the Filmin platform this Friday, a beautiful love letter to cinema that naturally hybridizes the forms of film essay, autofiction and the author documentary.

It will be a matter of the magnitudeBut how easily French cinema engages with immediate reality and boasts of any small feat in a national key. The director of the recent adaptation ofThe Three Musketeers brings to the screen the real episode of the emergency evacuation of hundreds of Afghan refugees carried out in extremis by a handful of French embassy police officers during the fall of Kabul to the Taliban. Based on the book by the man in charge of the operation, 13 days, 13 nights It takes the point of view of the police commander, a pragmatic veteran about to retire who must deal with the absolute chaos of a broken country, the extreme desperation of Afghan civilians, the threat of the Taliban and the doubts of the other police officers and their superiors.

In the narrative that typically accompanies the celebration of the Olympic Games—especially from the institutions that organize them—there are three recurring elements: effort, success, and transformation. It's as if the cities that host the event, like the athletes, had to experience a dramatic arc of overcoming, an epic race in which there seems to be no room for error or failure. It's against this backdrop of great expectations and triumph that the small story of Blandine, the film's discreet protagonist, unfolds. This summer in Paris, who travels alone from Normandy to the excited and bustling Paris of the recent Olympic Games to watch the swimming competition and reunite with her sister Julie, whom she hasn't seen for ten years. But things don't go as she expects: first, she's stuck outside the Olympic pool because she has nowhere to leave her backpack, and on her 30th birthday, she's expelled from a youth hostel for being overage. Furthermore, despite Blandine's interest in reconnecting with her sister, she seems more interested in rebuilding her sexual and emotional life, which has been disrupted by a recent divorce, than in rekindling old family ties.

Liane (Malou Khebizi), the protagonist of Diamond in the rough, exudes an energy very similar to that of Rosetta, the character in the Dardenne brothers' film of the same name, which forged a new standard of social cinema for the 21st century. She is also a working-class girl willing to do anything to get the job she yearns for, and whose drive drives the entire film forward. But while Rosetta was content with a stable job, Liane aspires to become "the French Kim Kardashian."