The setting is a one-room schoolhouse, which is momentarily unoccupied except for a pair of turtles. Wet snow rattling against the window reminds you of the bracing gray bluster of the day outside. Snow-laden evergreens are shrugging their branches in the wind, like sighing giants; while inside, the turtles labor with comic solemnity across the floor, beneath sun-colored furniture that will soon be bouncing with children.

The setting is the first-class cabin of an airplane, which is entirely filled with dozing passengers. Cocooned in white blankets, they lie silent in a dark and droning space that might as well not even have an outside. Video screens flash in identical rows before the sleepers, as if transmitting their collective dream: a scene of flaming chaos.

Let's hear it for French cinema, which has tossed up these exemplary moments in a pair of remarkable new releases: To Be and to Have by Nicolas Philibert and demonlover by Olivier Assayas. The first takes the form of a documentary and has the feel of an elegiac romance. The second takes the form of a feature and has the feel of a critical essay, or a delirious thriller, or maybe a critical delirium.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.