About a third of the way through “Esther Kahn” (2000), French director Arnaud Desplechin’s most mystifying work – and one of three to be shown this weekend in a mini-retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives, along with 1996’s “My Sex Life …” and 2004’s “Kings and Queen” – Ian Holm, in the role of a struggling stage actor turned reinvigorated acting coach, offers his new student some advice.

Every step you take has to be more unbelievable than the step you took before. Every step … every step has to have an idea behind it that is so complex that it would take 10 philosophers just to decipher it. Each step has to stretch like a rope in the audience’s mind, until they can’t bear it anymore, and they want to cry out, ‘Careful, Esther, you’re gonna break it!’

Having released six films in the last 15 years, Mr. Desplechin, now 45, has dedicated his career to fulfilling the sentiment behind this speech.

His characters tend to be contemporary Parisians in their 20s and 30s, all with a surfeit of romantic entanglements and neurotic tendencies. “My Sex Life …”explores a milieu of young intellectuals and captures a world filled with as much ambivalence as ambition and as much lust as love. Unlike “Kings and Queen,” where Mr. Desplechin inserts a fatherless child into the mix, the force of responsibility is weak in “My Sex Life …” – perhaps in disproportion to the strong sway of self-doubt, which is particularly paralyzing for the main character, Paul, an assistant professor of philosophy who can never figure out what to write about or whom to sleep with.

“Kings and Queen” reunites Mathieu Amalric and Emmaneulle Devos, who played Paul and his longtime girlfriend in “My Sex Life …” Their reunion is brief, for “Kings and Queen” unfolds two separate stories simultaneously – the tragedy of a woman losing her father and the comedy of a man under the delusion he’s insane (his shrink is Catherine Deneuve). The many sudden shifts in tone – often signified by jarring changes in light and music – are a trademark of Mr. Desplechin’s.

“I love to make films like roller coasters, from one very brutal emotion to another,” Mr. Desplechin once said, in an interview.And never has he been so daring than in “Kings and Queen,” where, for example, the bizarre humor of a middle-aged break dancer competes for control of the audience’s emotions with the breathtaking shock of a sudden diagnosis of inoperable cancer.

The success of Mr. Desplechin’s hysterical narratives depends on performances of unwavering authenticity. He tried to repay this debt to his actors in “Esther Kahn,” the strangest and most focused of his films. Set in early 20th-century England and written in English, “Esther Kahn” tells of a young woman’s quest to become an actress. In a miraculous performance by Summer Phoenix, Esther Kahn, who never reveals why she wants to be on the stage, escapes from a cruel childhood and grows up to exhibit an unsettling and ultimately confounding array of contradictory behaviors: blank-faced vulnerability, stubborn manipulation, and, eventually, masochism. The instructional scenes in an empty theater between Ms. Phoenix and Mr. Holm are some of Mr. Desplechin’s most intellectually thrilling.

Near the end of “Kings and Queen,” the fatherless boy is left alone with the delusional man. They explore a museum, eat a snack, take a walk.Then, in a moment of clarity, the man tells the lit tle boy what Mr.Desplechin, a filmmaker as curious and compassionate about the experience of interpretation as he is about the interpretation of experience, has been trying to tell his audience all along:

This is the only advice I have for now: Of course, we’re always right. But it’s always possible we could be a bit wrong, too. Being a bit wrong is very good news! It means you don’t have the whole answer – that life will be more exciting and full of surprises than you thought.

Until March 5 (32 Second Avenue at 2nd Street, 212-505-5181).