Embarking on a risky pursuit of happiness

If you were a lovelorn middle-age man, you might risk tracking down your first true love and attempting to win her back. Stuck in the cutthroat world of big-city real estate, your salvation could be a long-buried piano talent. And if you were a fading rock star and junkie and wanted to get your child back, you might try anything -- even going clean.

Leaving behind the carefully guarded self to risk enormous change is a theme found in several films in this year's Boston French Film Festival, which begins Thursday at the Museum of Fine Arts and continues through July 24. Now in its 10th year, the festival features 24 area premieres of films by well-known directors as well as several new talents.

One of the standouts is ''The Beat That My Heart Skipped," a remake of the 1978 American film ''Fingers." Directed by Jacques Audiard, the new film is driven by Romain Duris's performance as Tom, an explosive young man who seeks both his father's acceptance as a high-stakes property broker and a way out of its cycle -- violent rushes of adrenaline followed by disappointment and self-loathing.

Tom's deceased mother was a concert pianist, but Tom gave up any hope of following in her footsteps years ago. With an unexpected invitation to audition, however, he takes lessons from a Chinese immigrant piano teacher even as he continues his techno-music-fueled thuggery, and the same hands he uses to beat up squatting tenants begin to finesse a Brahms concerto.

Exploring the underside of Paris far from brightly lighted monuments, Audiard continues the bleak yet charged mood he successfully painted in 2002's ''Read My Lips." But it's the brilliant Duris (best known for ''L'Auberge Espagnole"), with his scrawny body and Mick Jagger-like sneer, who carries the film. He plays the jumpy, tortured Tom to perfection, adding a new twist to the role originated by Harvey Keitel.

''Lila Says," while less successful as a film, similarly involves the use of high culture as a means to escape fate. An aspiring artist in Marseille, Chimo (Mohammed Khouas, in his screen debut), hangs out with a band of crude and cynical young men. Inspired by the sultry Lila (Vahina Giocante), he considers abandoning his ghetto for Paris. While Giocante epitomizes the stereotype of the French teenage girl wise beyond her years, a surprise ending saves the film from cliche. Gorgeously shot along the waterfront and back alleys of France's second-largest city, ''Lila Says" also signals a turning away from Paris as the hub of all things cinematic.

In Emmanuel Mouret's ''Vénus and Fleur," there's a different sort of upheaval at work: the timid young Fleur (Isabelle Pirès), on vacation in Marseille, befriends the Russian Vénus (Veroushka Knoge), whose wild passion for life and ''boys" -- in particular, two men who happen to show up where the women are staying -- begins to rub off on Fleur. Mouret is attracted to character, not action, and the paper-thin plot is the simplest of love stories. But the beauty of both leads' honest performances makes ''Vénus and Fleur" more than a trifling summer fling -- it's an engaging, if modest, story of transformation.

More brutal destinies are painfully skirted in Olivier Assayas's ''Clean." In this multinational production, Maggie Cheung (''In the Mood for Love") switches among English, French, and Cantonese as the action moves from Paris to London to Vancouver. Her character, Emily, struggles to kick a heroin habit, mainly to prove she's fit to take care of her son, Jay. Since she became an addict, he's been staying with Albrecht (Nick Nolte) and Rosemary (Martha Henry), his father's parents. Assayas uses a sweeping Steadicam to great effect and has an eye for striking visual juxtapositions, such as a scene where Emily shoots up in a parked car as a jet of flame from a refinery ignites the sky. Parent-child dramas are tricky to navigate, but thankfully there's nothing sentimental about Assayas's pitch-perfect film or Cheung's performance, which won best actress at Cannes.

With a voracious appetite for acting, Gérard Depardieu has averaged four films a year since 1967, for a total of some 150. With three performances in this year's festival, he's well represented, even if the results are mixed. There's his well-meaning but pointless effort in ''Nathalie," a mostly ludicrous psychological-erotic drama that stars a blasé Fanny Ardant and the pouty Emmanuelle Béart. Nor does he have much to work with as a corrupt police chief in Olivier Marchal's violent and slick ''36 Quai des Orfèvres," which opens the festival. The film covers ground familiar to the organized-crime genre but offers the guilty pleasure of seeing Depardieu pitted against rival toughie Daniel Auteuil as the two of them, leveraging their connections to the Paris underworld, compete to be named the new police commissioner.

But in André Téchiné's ''Changing Times," Depardieu is united with fellow French cinema icon Catherine Deneuve, with striking results. Here Depardieu plays Antoine, a businessman who takes a last shot at happiness when he tracks down his former love, the high-strung Cécile (Deneuve) in Tangiers. Téchiné's on-location compositions impart a documentary look and feel as Cécile fends off Antoine's advances by hiding herself behind a veil of icy nonchalance. Among its many charms, Depardieu's bulbous face reminds viewers that not every leading man needs to be a picture-perfect Clooney or Pitt.

Deneuve also stars in Benoît Jacquot's ''Princesse Marie," a historical drama about the friendship between Sigmund Freud and a grand-niece of Napoleon's. But Jacquot's other entry in the festival, ''À Tout de Suite," is the one that's been getting the most attention. The loose story follows the movements, both physical and emotional, of confused Parisian art student Lili (Isild Le Besco), whose sudden crush on a bank robber leads her to Spain, Morocco, and Greece. With its hand-held camera work, grainy black-and-white stock and staccato rhythms, ''À Tout de Suite" is reminiscent of early New Wave classics such as Truffaut's ''Jules and Jim" and Godard's ''Breathless."

Fans of documentaries will find much to like in the festival, including ''Genesis," by Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, the directors behind ''Microcosmos" and ''Winged Migration." Their new film traces the origins of life and, filmed with their typical quirky bravado, it's both travelogue and astonishing natural history. There's also Agnès Varda's trilogy of documentaries about photography, ''Cinévardaphoto," and Gilles Jacob's ''History of the Cannes Film Festival," a witty compilation of a half a century of Cannes press conference clips, from Fellini to Coppola, Almodóvar to Eastwood. (Annoyingly, none of the directors or actors is identified on screen.)

Rounding out the program are Eric Rohmer's 1930s-era espionage drama, ''Triple Agent," as well as works by lesser-knowns such as Lucile Hadzihalilovic, whose ''Innocence" combines color and composition to create an eerie coming-of-age story befitting of David Lynch and calling to mind Peter Weir's ''Picnic at Hanging Rock"; it's perhaps the most visually compelling film of the entire festival.

The Chinese-French co-production ''Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress," a story about the power of literature set during the Chinese cultural revolution, is worth seeing, as is Abdellatif Kechiche's ''L'Esquive: Games of Love and Chance." The film features nonprofessional actors in the Paris suburbs to capture a teenage romance with impressive results: This sleeper went on to win the best film prize at France's 2005 César awards.

Ethan Gilsdorf can be reached at egilsdorf@yahoo.com.