In its triumphant closing weekend, Lincoln Center’s annual Gallic cinefest concludes with the lives of lonely itinerants: an actress who brings her bizarre one-woman show to sleepy northern French towns, a man with a sick ticker who shuttles from country to country in narrative-obliterating reverie, and a rocker, recovering from drug addiction, whose circuit is London-Paris-San Francisco.

“Life’s nice with you. I like it,” coos guileless Dries (Wim Willaert) to thespian Irene (Yolande Moreau, who also co-directed with Gilles Porte) in the charming “When the Tide Comes In” (March 19 & 20). Traveling from Valenciennes to Lens to Lille, zaftig Irene, her arms smeared in red body makeup and her face hidden behind a commedia dell’arte mask, performs her quasifeminist (and painfully unfunny) show, “A Nasty Business: Sex and Crime,” on any stage that will have her.

Hapless, starstruck Dries, with a show-business job of his own as an operator of giant mannequins, romances the actress, who each night dutifully phones the husband and son left at home. The tender courtship fades quickly, but its peaks – a hotel romp, a nap on the beach – are moments of fleeting intimacy, beautifully crafted. Ms. Moreau, who won a Cesar for Best Actress, and Mr. Willaert, who suggests a more vulnerable Robert Carlyle, play their characters like smitten, compassionate Drama Club oddballs.

Its own time-and-space oddity, Claire Denis’s “The Intruder” is easily “Rendez-vous’s” most visually opulent film (it was shot in CinemaScope by the magnificent Agnes Godard) – and its most satisfyingly opaque. The “events” of the film, whether actual or hallucinated, center around Louis, a weathered, white-haired barrel of a man played by Michel Subor – who was in “Beau Travail” (1999), Ms. Denis’s gorgeous gloss on both Billy Budd and Godard’s “Le Petit Soldat” (1963), in which Mr. Subor starred.

Louis needs a new heart – but for himself or his son (Denis favorite Gregoire Colin)? Or for the son Louis may or may not have sired in Oceania? Bloody organs are found in the snow, bodies are frozen under ice, Louis croons “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” with a stranger in a Pusan bar – each elliptical moment offers its own aural and visual pleasures, privileging sensory response over narrative linearity.

Maggie Cheung’s astonishing turn as a junk-kicking mom trying to make good in Olivier Assayas’s “Clean” redefines the women’s weepie (when I watched it, I broke down in tears at least twice). With an electroshock of hair and a hard, steely gaze, Ms. Cheung plays Emily, a nasty rock songstress manque who meddles in the career of her 42-year-old husband, Lee (James Johnston), who is headed for punk obscurity.

It’s better to burn out than fade away: Lee OD’s on the heroin Emily bought, and she does time in stir. Behind bars, she weans herself off horse; once sprung, all she wants is Jay (James Dennis), her young son, currently under the supervision of her father-in-law, (Nick Nolte), back. “If I want to see Jay, I have to change my life,” Emily says with heartbreaking determination, taking jobs in din-filled Chinese restaurants and fruity department stores in Paris.

But sometimes, the stalwart facade cracks, revealing an unbearable loneliness: “I wish Lee were here to tell me everything’s going to be okay. Why did he leave me all alone?” she sobs to an indifferent, glammed-up acquaintance. Although unmoored by the loss of her partner’s reassurance and still horribly vulnerable, Emily valiantly forges ahead. Ms. Cheung’s performance perfectly captures unbearable moments, never letting us forget our own times of despair.