The Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 12th annual edition of “Rendez-vous With French Cinema” begins tonight with the American premiere of Olivier Dahan’s new film, “La Vie en Rose.” Showcasing the life and times of the inescapably iconic French chanteuse Edith Piaf, the film, which made a splash last month at the Berlin Film Festival, is a colorful widescreen show business biopic, clearly intended for international export.

As an opening night film for Lincoln Center’s 16-film survey of contemporary French movies, “La Vie en Rose” is an appropriately accessible entertainment. And, like the rest of the films in the series, it’s a vivid illustration of the dual personality of France’s artistically high-minded but increasingly internationally competitive film industry.

“French film is clearly the most popular national cinema for American art house audiences,” Gary Palmucci, of New York-based distributor Kino International, said. “But like a lot of national cinemas, I get the sense that it’s in transition.”

Through such in-house series as New Directors/New Films, Film Comment Selects, and its hosting of the New York Film Festival, the FSLC has doggedly championed the individual creative voices of contemporary French autuerist cinema. But within the French film business, “that old model of artistically driven and challenging filmmaking is giving way more to marketplace-driven films,” Mr. Palmucci said.

“One of the things we try to emphasize in ‘Rendez-vous’ is diversity,” the program director of FSLC, Richard Peña, said. “We try to show with a limited number of films that France is making terrific movies nowadays.”

To that end, this year’s “Rendezvous” survey offers export-friendly fare like “La Vie en Rose” alongside the idiosyncratic, personal filmmaking that state sponsorship makes possible. If “La Vie En Rose” and polished romantic comedies like “I Do!” represent one side of that national aesthetic dialogue, Bruno Dumont’s oblique and brutal “Flanders” occupies the other. Winner of the jury prize at Cannes last year, “Flanders” continues the visually keen and emotionally diffuse exploration of violence and sexuality that Mr. Dumont previously undertook in 1999’s “Humanité,” and 2003’s “Twentynine Palms.” A kind of zero-affect, kitchen-sink war romance, “Flanders” offers perhaps the least sentimentalized pair of childhood sweethearts separated by war ever seen on screen. Battlefield atrocities abroad and pathologically motivated, passionless sex acts at home receive the same detached, coolly observed treatment.

As in Mr. Dumont’s previous films, essential and recognizable nuggets of human truth are unsettlingly revealed through shockingly aberrant behavior. There are any number of filmmakers working in the world today who are more than willing to catalog human cruelty and misery. But Mr. Dumont does so with a compositional precision, compassion, and disregard for exploitation-movie catharsis that make his films utterly unique.

Since the Lumiére Brothers’ landmark 19th-Century silent proto-documentaries, French cinema has often explored the diaphanous frontier separating everyday reality from narrative manipulation. Based on an unfinished script concept by the late Maurice Pialat, Patrick Grandperret’s “Murderers” echoes Pialat’s highly influential (though still sadly unrecognized in America) and quintessentially French social-realist approach to storytelling. Like Christophe Honoré’s “Dans Paris” and several other films in the retrospective, “Murderers” compiles and compounds speed-of-life incidents into vivid, character-explicating drama. “It almost feels unscripted,” Mr. Peña said. “It’s so loose and natural that it hovers between documentary and fiction.”

Occupying the middle of the road between Gallic realist restraint and internationally exportable entertainment is Guillaume Canet’s adaptation of American mystery novelist Harlan Coben’s “Tell No One.” Homegrown American thrillers increasingly offer their audience either a handful of unsurprising and unbelievable possible outcomes from which to choose or, like Christopher Nolan’s 2000 thriller “Memento,” substitute half-baked formalist experimentation for storytelling. “Tell No One,” meticulously and expertly unravels its murder conspiracy with a wit and rigor that seems extinct in modern mystery movies. The film lovingly embraces genre conventions even as it subverts them. A mid-film foot chase feauturing a wrongly accused killer and police delivers one of the best-executed small-scale action sequences you’ll ever see while slyly commenting on the downward social trajectory of middle-class people who’ve run afoul of the law.

Even an international-filmmarket show pony like “La Vie en Rose” possesses a characteristically French filmic intelligence. Despite the coat of surface gloss, “La Vie en Rose” has little in common with the standard-issue hagiographies continually churned out in Hollywood. Were it an American production, “La Vie en Rose” might climax with a heavenly choir of angels offering pauvre Edith a glass of Cassis before bearing her away to a pearly gated Pigalle in her final moments.

Instead, the film unsentimentally details Piaf’s rags-to-riches-to-drugs-to-cancer-to-death-at-47 saga by coolly reshuffling the narrative deck of the singer’s life in a way that maximizes both nostalgic spectacle and intimate and impressionistic emotional truth.

“It’s not ‘Ray,'” Mr. Peña said.

Through March 11 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza at West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).