The New York Film Festival is a feast of many parts, but its divisions are mainly symbolic. Such major festivals as those in Cannes, Berlin, and Venice are competitive; they offer prizes and make a distinction between movies in the main competition and those in other sections. Thus, the value judgments in those programming decisions have practical effects. The New York Film Festival is different: it was conceived as a “festival of festivals,” presenting movies that made their débuts at other festivals. The N.Y.F.F. also reliably features some world premières, but they’re nestled among a throng of movies already seen elsewhere. The festival’s parsing of films into its Main Slate and its other sections (principally Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals) is an unofficial consumer guide. The Main Slate is the prime showcase of what’s deemed best in the year of world cinema; the Spotlight offers what’s widely anticipated; and, in this year’s program guide, Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, calls Currents “our home for films that push against the conventions of cinematic form.”
As a result, it should come as no surprise that one of the best films of the festival (and of the year) is screening in Currents: “Red Rocks,” by the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. He’s among the world’s great directors of children—from the tough North Sea adolescents in his political crime comedy “Li’l Quinquin” (2014) to the child Joan of Arc in his rock opera “Jeannette” (2017). But the most original work he has done with children is in this new film (which premièred at Cannes in May). “Red Rocks” is a high-tension melodrama, set mainly in a calm, gentrified town on the French Riviera, about two groups of idle youths who meet by chance and clash when a girl from one group and a boy from the other become romantically involved. The characters, like the actors who portray them, are somewhere between five and seven years old.