By Tim Jackson

It is a shame that international film festivals cannot be made accessible to wider audiences, but the trend toward online gatherings, such as the Online French Film Festival, is a good start.

The recent Online French Film Festival, a pay-per-view series of contemporary films sponsored by Film Movement Plus, invited a global audience to vote for their favorites. Here are reviews of three standout films from this year’s excellent selection. It is a shame that international festivals cannot be made accessible to wider audiences, but the trend toward online gatherings like this one is a good start. Look for these movies on streaming platforms or at this summer’s MFA French Film Festival.

A scene from director Katell Quillévéré’s Along Came Love.

Along Came Love begins with newsreel footage of women who had collaborated with or had relationships with Nazis during World War II. The women have been beaten, their heads shaved. In some cases, swastikas have been painted on their bodies. We see a pregnant woman desperately scrubbing the symbol from her swollen belly. The film cuts suddenly to the early ’50s: Madeleine is working as a waitress at a coastal French restaurant in Normandy as she raises her baby. Such sudden ellipses in time and circumstance propel what turns out to be a sprawling tale of history and fate.

One day, on the beach, she encounters François, a soft-spoken and cultured student whose family owns a large house on the shore. A quiet relationship begins. She confesses about her past; he admits to having just ended a serious relationship. Eventually, they marry, but the story does not move in predictable ways. The couple befriends a charming Black American soldier, to whom both are attracted. A disastrous ménage à trois leads Madeleine to confirm that her husband’s earlier romantic relationship was with a man. This revelation puts their relationship on tenterhooks. Then François inherits a family fortune and the couple have a child. The first child, now a teenager, begins demanding information about his German father. The ensuing, messy tangle of history, sexuality, and family veers in troubling directions. Decades of twists and turns are packed into two hours, as director Katell Quillévéré continually shifts our sympathies and melodrama careens toward tragedy.

A scene from director Sonia Kronlund’s The Man with a Thousand Faces.

The Man with a Thousand Faces (L’homme aux Mille Visages) is not to be confused with the Lon Chaney bio-pic. This French documentary blends reality and reenactments into a kind of detective story. First produced as a podcast, and then as a book, director and producer Sonia Kronlund’s first-person quest follows her investigation of a man who managed to have simultaneous relationships with numerous women across the globe. He lived with several, often claiming that his job required a lot of traveling. In one case, he fathered a child. Among other fabrications, he claimed to be a surgeon, a Peugeot engineer, and that he was raised in Argentina, sometimes in Brazil. He went by the names Alexandre, Ricardo and Daniel, inventing entire family histories and backgrounds.

Effortlessly changing personalities to charm each of his victims, the chameleon romances the women and hustles their money. With the help of the director and a hired detective, four of the women who were fooled into relationships set out on a quest to expose the imposter. Initially, the film blots out the man’s face in photographs. Once it is discovered he has been using a Face Swap application to create different identities — and after checking the legalities of publicly exposing the guy — his real identity is revealed. The hunt then intensifies. The women preferred to remain anonymous; they permitted themselves to be portrayed by professional actors. The result is an ingeniously layered hybrid of performance and documentary — a fascinating psychological and forensic investigation into duplicity and identity in our age of virtual realities.

Raphaël Thiéry in a scene from director Anaïs Tellenne’s The Dreamer.

The Grand Prix of the International Jury — via a global online voting audience — went to The Dreamer. The eponymous hero is Raphaël, a hulking caretaker who lives on the grounds of an estate with his badgering mother. He sports an eyepatch, plays the bagpipes, and hunts moles with explosives in his spare time, hanging their pelts from a fence. Late one night, Garance, the heiress of the property, turns up unexpectedly to visit her estate, exhausted and depressed. We eventually learn that she is both a skilled sculptor and a quirky conceptual artist. In one of her works, for example, Garance captured tears culled from all her moments of sadness and placed them into tiny glass vials for display as a mobile.

Fascinated by Raphaël’s musical skill (he practices his bagpipes in the estate’s empty swimming pool) and drawn by his lumbering beauty, Garance asks permission to sculpt him in clay. As requested, he strips down to his undershorts and submits to her creative gaze. As the sculpture takes form, Raphaël becomes infatuated with her. He then becomes a momentary celebrity after Garance shows the work to a group of her artsy friends before a gallery show. Raphaël Thiéry plays the bagpipes in real life: his imposing physicality and primitive beauty are perfect for the role. Emmanuelle Devos makes Garance an engaging character. Director Anaïs Tellenne uses the story’s fairy tale resonances as a means to meditate on the relationship between art and life, dream and reality. Sadly, it is unlikely that this frog will ever become a prince.

Tim Jackson was an assistant professor of Digital Film and Video for 20 years. His music career in Boston began in the 1970s and includes some 20 groups, recordings, national and international tours, and contributions to film soundtracks. He studied theater and English as an undergraduate, and has also worked helter-skelter as an actor and member of SAG and AFTRA since the 1980s. He has directed three feature documentaries: Chaos and Order: Making American Theater about the American Repertory Theater; Radical Jesters, which profiles the practices of 11 interventionist artists and agit-prop performance groups; When Things Go Wrong: The Robin Lane Story. And two short films: Joan Walsh Anglund: Life in Story and Poem and The American Gurner. He is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. You can read more of his work on his blog.