An alternative title of Potiche could have been Men on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. In this, the latest film from French directorial chameleon François Ozon, the men are the irrational ones – clingy, petulant and generally bewildered – while the film’s female protagonist, played by Catherine Deneuve, is the film’s rational, resolute, forward-thinking, confident and wholly electable moral center.

It’s never been surprising that women can be all of these things, of course, but in the ostentatiously sexist context of Potiche, set in the industrial 1970s, Deneuve’s muscular and intellectual outpacing of her male counterparts causes quite a stir.

Loosely adapted from a 1980s French play and staged largely in and around an umbrella factory full of disgruntled workers, Potiche looks at feminism and worker’s rights in an era that saw little of either. Fabrice Luchini plays Robert Pujol, the buffoonish, adulterous, antiunion proprietor of the factory who is all but overthrown by his deceptively airy trophy wife Suzanne (Deneuve). She gains a majority stake in the company and proceeds to properly compensate its workers and modernize its stock, with some help from her best frenemy: Gerard Depardieu, a Old Guard left-wing politician who’s as big as Michael Moore (in more ways that one: You need an awfully wide screen to frame Depardieu’s increasingly morbid girth).

Depardieu’s Maurice Babin had a fling with Suzanne in another life, and he’s since played the jilted lover as convincingly as the jaded leftist. When it’s revealed that Maurice may in fact be the father of Suzanne’s liberal son Laurent (Jérémie Renier), it creates more comic schisms in a family already divided by politics.

Potiche is reminiscent thematically – and only thematically – of the recent Made in Dagenham, another historical look at the nexus of women’s rights and labor rights. But unlike the preachy, humorless Dagenham, Potiche is as light and refreshing as a pinafore.

Joyously colorful, just like the loudest Almodovar films, Potiche is a loopy and self-conscious comedy that takes its serious thematic grounding and sends it soaring into a deliberately artificial cinematic landscape full of unusual editing transitions, a cartoony score and hilariously stilted flashbacks. It’s hard to take this lush fantasy too seriously when one of the first shots in the film is of fornicating squirrels, one of many images of nature’s bounty that enlivens Suzanne’s exercise route.

This film has received some of Ozon’s best theatrical distribution in some time, probably playing on the most screens since 2003’s erotic thriller Swimming Pool. It’s practically a wide release compared to his most recent features, Ricky and Hideaway, two tonally polarized takes on pregnancy and its aftershocks. In South Florida, these films only played short runs at the Tower Theatre and the Regal South Beach; Potiche, by contrast, sold out the substantial Gusman Center in March’s Miami International Film Festival and packed another house a few weeks later at the Palm Beach International Film Festival.

It’s easy to see why; it’s a charming audience movie, not very demanding on those with subtitle phobia, and equally rewarding for mass audiences and urbane cinephiles alike. Deneuve and Depardieu, the last lions of the ’70s French cinema mainstream, aren’t getting any younger, but they have a lot of fun satirizing politics, history and themselves under Ozon’s sardonic camera.

POTICHE. Distributor: Music Box Films; Director: Francois Ozon; Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Gérard Depardieu, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, Judith Godrèche, Jérémie Renier; in French with English subtitles. Rating: R; Opens: Friday; Venues: Regal Shadowood 16, Regal Delray Beach, Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth, COBB Jupiter 18, PGA Cinamax 6, Frank Gateway 4, Frank Theaters at Sunrise 11, Frank Intracoastal 8, Regal South Beach 18 and Coral Gables Art Cinema.

‘Tis the season for romantic science-fiction parables about attractive young men prohibited, through their stories’ elaborate conceits, from accessing the brunette beauties who are ready and willing to jump their bones.

In Source Code, which opens wide Friday, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan are a lot like Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in The Adjustment Bureau, their blooming romance thwarted by godlike powers that be. The major difference, however, is a matter of national security.

Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a soldier stationed in Afghanistan who wakes up, at the film’s opening, assuming the body and identity of a teacher on a train. Monaghan’s Christina speaks to him as if he were the teacher, whom she has known for some time, and she can’t comprehend his suddenly peculiar behavior.

Eight minutes later, the train explodes and everyone dies.

Colter then wakes up in an enclosed pod but, contrary to his rational assumption, the train test was not a military simulation. The train did blow up that very morning, but, through a wormhole of quantum-physics gobbledygook, the Department of Homeland Security has found a way to transport certain people, mentally, through the time-space continuum and into the body of a person with a similar genetic makeup, who ….

Oh, forget it. You won’t believe any of this until you see it, and even then you probably won’t. But it doesn’t matter – Source Code is jolting, high-energy, briskly moving action-sci-fi-mystery-romance hybrid, and if you don’t try to deconstruct the science behind it, you’ll have a blast. All you really need to remember is Colter’s purpose on the train, which makes for a compelling race-against-time thriller a la Speed or Unstoppable: He has exactly eight minutes to ascertain the identity of the bomber, track him off the train at its one stopping point, and deliver the man’s identity to his controllers at Homeland Security so they can find him before he strikes again.

The number of times Colter can relive these eight minutes is virtually unlimited, so he uses each identical session for incremental improvements in his task: taking mental notes of suspicious activity, locating the bomb, studying its detonation method, ruling out certain passengers – and using the knowledge gained in previous eight-minute “dates” to fall deeper in love with Christina.

So essentially, Source Code is the Groundhog Day of existential counterterrorism, with a recurring fireball of death and destruction instead of Sonny and Cher. An elegant metaphysical construct inside an elegant metaphysical construct, the train and pod that Colter calls home for the movie’s entirety are veritable riddles wrapped in mysteries inside enigmas.

As the equivalent to the business-suit wearing throwbacks in The Adjustment Bureau, these enigmas are presided over by a couple of convincing, real-world-in-real-time human beings whose presence ushers us into the complex environments. Vera Farmiga plays Carol, the Homeland Security agent who doles out instructions to Colter, and a hobbled Jeffrey Wright is Carol’s supervisor, an impatient government huckster hoping this experience with the “source code” will lead to its mainstream acceptance by the Pentagon.

Also like The Adjustment Bureau, Source Code is a political thriller that isn’t very political, but both have their old-fashioned charms. In Source Code, much of this charm draws from the train setting, which evokes a musty, quaintly Hitchcockian ambience. As I tiptoe around the sacrosanct sin of plot spoilage, suffice it to say that no matter how bad The Adjustment Bureau’s ending was, the climax of Source Code is infinitely worse, belying just about everything we’ve seen before it, including the film’s own strict logic.

Source Code is a wonderful idea that sustains itself in moving and interesting ways for about 85 of its 93 minutes. Walk out at this point and you’ll have experienced something very close to a modern action masterpiece.

SOURCE CODE. Director: Duncan Jones; Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright, Russell Peters, Michael Arden; Distributor: Summit Entertainment; Rated: PG-13; Release date: April 1, most commercial theaters

Gregg Araki puts the “terrible” in enfant terrible.

For more than 20 years, the filmmaker has staked his dubious claim as the foremost auteur of vacuous Gen-X movies about sexually experimental hipsters. With one notable exception – the disturbing and deeply moving Mysterious Skin, which boasted the best performance of Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s career -- his movies are stultifying glimpses into a void of hedonism and eye-rolling self-referentiality, as artistically malignant as they are intellectually deflated.

Araki’s latest, Kaboom, is essentially a science-fiction movie, albeit a subversive one that deserves some credit for wandering way off the genre’s reservation. Unfortunately, the places it wanders off to resemble the hollow vacuum of juvenilia that is home to just about every other Araki film.

The film showcases the 52-year-old writer-director at his infantile worst. His fans may hold him in a higher regard than such low-hanging directorial fruit as Kevin Smith and Dennis Dugan, but his movies are just puerile. How’s this for a priceless line of Araki dialogue, from one of his sexually liberated female characters: “If I come anymore tonight, my cooch is gonna break off.”

When he isn’t trying to shock us with his characters’ sexual frankness, Araki bombards us with pop-culture snark and litmus-test references to his favorite music and movies, from New Order to Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou. “Are you worried?” asks protagonist Smith (Thomas Dekker) to his best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) following some strange occurrences on the college campus they share. “Does Mel Gibson hate Jews?” she replies, without missing a beat.

Araki’s cinematic fantasylands are populated exclusively by cultured, quick-witted horndogs just like these two contrived specimens, their lines dripping with their screenwriter’s self-satisfaction. Others include Juno Temple as a randy British tart with an ’80s coif and a library of Buzzcocks references, James Duval as a hippie prophet of doom and Chris Zylka as a perpetually shirtless surfer-hunk named Thor who tries to master the art of self-fellatio.

A realistic conversation between these creatures is about as rare as an intriguing shot. For Araki, the cinematography is all about a motley, eye-catching set design and a multicolored mise-en-scène that tries, unsuccessfully, to mask the director’s pedestrian eye.

Kaboom’s ramshackle plot follows around Smith and Stella as they attempt to fornicate their way through one mysterious phenomeon after another, from the real-life manifestations of recurring dreams to strangers in animal masks slaying women in the dead of night to a devious new mate who harbor powers of supernatural possession and witchcraft. It is at once a near-pornographic, bisexual college comedy, a slasher film and a paranoid political thriller, all mashed together into a scuzzy ball and spat onto the screen. Some of it is arousing, some of it mildly interesting, but most of the time, you’ll just feel icky and impatient.

By the time the picture ends, on a surprisingly fun note of anarchic, existential lunacy that is too late in justifying its characters’ artificiality, you won’t care about the results. More likely, you’ll wonder why people keep letting Araki make movies.

KABOOM. Director: Gregg Araki; Cast: Thomas Dekker, Haley Bennett, James Duval, Andy Fisher-Price, Jason Olive, Juno Temple, Chris Zylka; Distributor: IFC Films; Rating: R. Now playing at Living Room Theaters at FAU in Boca Raton, Frank Gateway 4 in Fort Lauderdale and Coral Gables Art Cinema in Coral Gables.

Palm Beach County used to be film-festival challenged, but now we have a glut of options for moviegoers who want to get away from a steady diet of studio fare and perhaps rub shoulders with some of the filmmakers. It is, after all, not a hard sell to get directors and actors to come to Palm Beach in the final, frozen days of winter.

Tonight kicks off the 16th annual Palm Beach International Film Festival, which each year lately threatens to be its last as corporate sponsorships get tighter in this economy and the festival no longer has the political muscle it once enjoyed.

Still, it opens with a solid winner, Tom McCarthy’s Win Win, the assured saga of a hapless New Jersey lawyer (the great Paul Giamatti) who pulls an unethical move on an aging, growing senile client (Burt Young) and risks losing his practice. Nevertheless, his luck improves as the client’s grandson from Ohio comes to visit and he happens to be a wrestling whiz, who joins the high school squad that Giamatti coaches and breaks them out of their losing streak. Factor in terrific support from Amy Ryan, and you have a smart film with complex characters worth rooting for.

Young will be present at the screening tonight at the Muvico at CityPlace and if you miss Win Win tonight, it will likely be repeated in the final days of the nine-day fest, when the most popular entries are rerun.

Festival organizers are justifiably proud that they have amassed 11 world premieres, 3 U.S. premieres and 14 Florida premieres, with films from such countries as the Netherlands, Italy, France, England, Russia, Israel, Australia, Liberia, the Czech Republic, Canada and Greece.

Attendance over the years has been erratic, but if independent and foreign films are your passion, this is probably your best local chance to see a wde variety of them on the big screen. For the schedule, go to www.pbfilmfest.org.

***

A decidedly more offbeat and smaller event is the African-American Film Festival, a series of three movies focusing on the history of black cinema, showing at the Kravis Center for the sixth straight year.

Producer James Drayton usually emphasizes films of social and cultural significance, but this year’s attention-getting theme is “Movies We Might Rather Forget.”

For three Tuesday evenings, beginning March 29, attendees can see three incredibly politically incorrect selections from the days of unabashed racial stereotyping. The festival kicks off with an evening of episodes from the notorious Amos and Andy Show, which is so rarely shown these days. Similarly, it will be followed by 1945’s Open the Door, Richard, a starring vehicle for Stepin Fetchit, the comic actor whose very stage name is synonymous with “slowness and laziness and stupidity,” notes Drayton.

The third show of the festival is also from 1945, Brewster’s Millions, the fable of a guy who can inherit a large fortune if he can spend a small fortune in a limited amount of time. If that sounds familiar, it is probably because of the 1985 remake starring Richard Pryor. But the one in the African-American Film Festival features Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, not in the leading role, but as the wealthy spendthrift’s servant sidekick.

“These are all films that have a cloud over them,” says Drayton, a former area bookstore owner. “I think this is a marvelous opportunity to really look at this and learn something.”

Perhaps. Expect a lively, heated discussion following each screening, hosted by AnEta Sewell, Emmy Award-winning former area newscaster, currently seen on the CW/My TV Network weekly public affairs program Around Our Town.

For more information and for tickets, go to www.kravis.org.

Next: The first ever Palm Beach Women’s International Film Festival.

Around a Small Mountain (Cinema Guild)

Release date: March 8

Standard list price: $26.99

Could it be that French director Jacques Rivette, the New Wave lion who just turned 83, is finally slowing down? What else can we make of the fact that his latest feature, which could very well be his last, is a scant 84 minutes? For Rivette, Around a Small Mountain is the equivalent of most directors’ short films. His leanest titles usually come in around 150 minutes, and his 270-minute film Out 1: Spectre was pared down from a 12-hour movie shot for French television.

It’s a testament to Rivette’s style – a mix of realistic scripted dialogue with improvisation and documentary-like diversions – that his films never feel their length, and Around a Small Mountain goes by like a passing train. It stars Sergio Castelitto as Vittorio, an enigmatic Italian vagabond -- a man without a past and, apparently, without a future. All we know of him is presented onscreen: We first see him pull over on a mountainous road to silently repair a broken-down car driven by Kate (Jane Birkin, growing into a doppelganger for Annette Bening). Their film-opening encounter is like an anti- meet-cute. No words are exchanged, and the drifter drifts on.

But their destinations, apparently, are the same, because they soon bump into each other again and speak the movie’s first lines of dialogue. Kate is returning to her late father’s dilapidated circus that she fled 15 years earlier when, as we later learn, a horrific accident left her banished from the business. Bringing herself back into the fold, Kate upsets the circus’s proverbial apple cart, which was already in shambles. The way Rivette directs it, the clown sketches, high-wire acts and feats of derring-do are presented like self-conscious performance art, played to catatonic, microscopically small audiences that make Clint Eastwood’s ragtag rodeo in Bronco Billy look like Ringling Brothers.

Then there’s Vittorio, who won’t seem to go away. If he carries a torch for Kate, he doesn’t do a very good job keeping it lit. Rather than slowly build up a romance, Rivette casts his two leads as impenetrable strangers whose brief, staccato conversations usually end disagreeably.

The absence of sentimentality and conventional plot mechanics is refreshing. Rivette frees his characters from the structure of narratives and just let them be, so that by the end, we tend to understand them as people even if we don’t understand, per se, the causal transition from one scene to the other. Character is always foregrounded over plot – a radical decision by Hollywood standards.

Rivette’s formal decisions are just as unconventional -- and just as pleasing. He films most scenes in long, observational takes, planting the camera on a tripod and following his characters’ small movements. There is almost no multi-camera coverage. It’s indescribably wonderful not to have to sit through another endless procession of shot-reverse-shot conversations. Formally and narratively, from the next edit to the next scene, we don’t know what we’re going to see. As a result, the spectator discovers the story along with the characters, rather than anticipates its inevitabilities – of which, in this case, there are none.

The director’s admirers will no doubt appreciate the film’s circus stagecraft, only the latest example of Rivette’s ongoing smudging of the boundaries between art, craft and life. His films are a veritable dissertation on the artificiality of performance vis-a-vis the messy realities of the real world, a theme that can be traced to his Paris Belongs to Us, Love on the Ground, The Gang of Four, La Belle Noiseuse, Va Savoir and, to some extent, his most well-known movie, Celine and Julie Go Boating.

At under an hour and half, Around a Small Mountain may be the best introduction to Rivette’s world view; needless to say, it’s one of most overlooked films of 2010 – a sheer joy from beginning to end.

Rage (Strand)

Release date: March 8

SLP: $22.49

Spanish director Sebastian Cordero directed this moody pseudo-noir about an immigrant construction worker with severe anger management issues. Unable to control the rage boiling inside of him, Jose (Gustavo Sanchez Parra) attacks, and eventually murders, anyone who all but looks at his new girlfriend Rosa (Martina Garcia), the housemaid of the Torreses, an affluent married couple. When Jose pushes his former boss to his death, he hides out like an animal under the Torreses’ noses – or, to be precise, above the noses – in their attic, surrounded by rat feces. Gazing at the family through keyholes, Jose becomes a living, voyeuristic ghost, haunting the creaky floorboards and calling Rosa on occasion from the upstairs telephone while never revealing his whereabouts (lest he is captured by the inquisitive authorities). In this bleak, cynical picture, only Rosa is worth cheering for; Jose is a disturbed man who needs the mental health he’ll never receive, and the Torreses are a family of pampered, bourgeois miscreants, lechers and cockroaches plucked from a Bunuel film. But eventually, the movie sheds its moody, violent tone and becomes even more effective as a tragic story of forbidden love.

Letters to Father Jacob (Olive Films)

Release date: March 8

SLP: $26.99

Aki Kaurismaki may be the poster boy for Finnish cinema, but Klaus Haro now has eight movies under his belt, most of them heavy dramas and documentaries with minuscule distribution. His latest, Letters to Father Jacob, is a small, austere piece about a soul who needs saving and a blind priest fearful of his increasing irrelevancy in the modern world. The title character lives in a remote cottage blanketed by the gorgeous, agrestic Finnish landscape, where he waits daily for handwritten letters from parishioners who seek his prayers and advice. Unable to read the letters himself, he hires the newly pardoned Leila, a death-row inmate, whose shelter he provides in exchange for the opportunity to heal her emotional scars. It’s telling that there is almost no sign of electronic communication in the film; everything in Letters to Father Jacob, including the transport of letters, is slower than in most movies. The film is an understated, minor-key redemption song with a predictably elliptical climax. Compared to the ascetic examinations of faith in the films of Bergman or Bresson, it’s small potatoes.

Hemingway’s Garden of Eden (Lionsgate)

Release date: March 15

SLP: $17.99

Crazy chicks are totally in vogue right now. But next to such stake-raising fare as Natalie Portman in Black Swan, Amanda Seyfried in Chloe and Leighton Meester in The Roommate, Mena Suvari’s borderline-suffering, shape-shifting flapper in Garden of Eden is a rather quaint psycho, acting out her pathology sexually in the bland environs of this adaptation of an unfinished Hemingway story. Catherine, Suvari’s imposing socialite, rushes a marriage to writer David Bourne (Jack Huston, of Boardwalk Empire fame), and most of the film charts the disintegration of their newfound relationship during an extended honeymoon in Europe. Changing her physical appearance as frequently as her moods, Catherine subjects David to demeaning sexual fantasies and belittles his literary kudos, finally inviting a sexy visitor (Caterina Murino) they meet on their holiday to spice up, and tear apart, their sex life. Hemingway’s Garden of Eden is postcard-pretty prestige porn, a sunlit Zalman King wannabe that celebrates, rather than exposes, hedonistic bourgeois vacuity. John Irvin, who directed Hamburger Hill and Next of Kin, can’t establish an iota of emotional connection to any of these people, and the film’s one strong element – its effective eroticism – dissipates into a laughable, cliché-riddled melodrama.