I've been trying for ages to put my finger on the difference between the French and British film worlds, and now I think I've got it. The difference is that, over there, the stars turn up to the works disco. This week, the French cinema industry threw a closing-night party for a delegation of visiting foreign buyers and journalists in a no-frills disco off the Champs-Elysées. Nothing remotely flashy - just assorted distributors, hacks and movie business office workers making the most of the free drinks. But, look - isn't that Sophie Marceau on the dance floor, just north of Sergi Lopez? And, over there, Emmanuelle Béart? And not a press photographer to be seen. In London, of course, anyone who ever turned up halfway down the EastEnders cast list is unlikely to grace an event unless there's a guaranteed full contingent from the OK! photo desk.

For the past three years, Unifrance, a body that promotes French cinema abroad, has been organising an annual "European rendezvous" - a big junket at which foreign delegates can watch new films and journalists can bag a few interviews. My own film-nerd instinct on arrival is to scan the pages of listings mag Pariscope and the fabulously unpronounceable arts weekly Les Inrockuptibles to see what's new on release. As always, there's at least one French comedy with an unfeasibly unwieldy title - this season's is People Who Wear Swimming Suits Are Not (Necessarily) Superficial (love those brackets).

There's also usually an event film the critics love to hate. This season, it's the first feature in eight years by Jean-Jacques Beineix, director of Diva and Betty Blue. Mortel Transfert (Deadly Transference) is a deliriously convoluted psychoanalytical thriller about a shrink (the perennially droopy Jean-Hugues Anglade), who nods off in a session with a femme fatale patient and wakes to find her strangled. The film is an expensively ghoulish goulash of flashy interiors, necrophilia, S&M and slapstick, with the odd Lacan reference thrown in. It's dreadful, but compulsively watchable, and you won't be missing much if it never comes here.

Most of the screenings Unifrance has on offer are commercial rather than art-house fare. An unidentified French filmgoer is quoted in Variety this week as saying that French films are more intelligent, "except those with Gérard Depardieu", and Le Placard (The Closet), this week's big opener, bears that out. It's directed by mainstream comedy stalwart Francis Veber (Le Dner de Cons), and the appropriate response is: shrug, bof!, harmless if you like that sort of thing. Daniel Auteuil plays a shy accountant who pretends to be gay to keep his job. Depardieu, on amiable good-sport form, is his macho personnel manager. It's a well-intentioned, old-fashioned, drab film that only works if you imagine a world in which no one had ever met a gay man before, or your idea of comedy is a poker-faced Auteuil wearing an outsize condom on his head.

Then there's the debut feature by British TV's favourite professional Frenchman, Antoine de Caunes. Les Morsures de l'Aube (Love Bites) is a would-be hip vampire thriller about a satanic brother-sister duo who haunt the Paris club scene. It's slick, dated Goth tack. Eurotrash indeed. But it boasts what may prove the strangest dialogue-bite of the year, in a sex scene featuring hyper-trendy vamp Asia Argento: "I won't take my bra off, as I have huge breasts. But perhaps you recognise it - it's an exact replica of the one worn by Janet Leigh in Psycho."

But the real knockout was La Ville Est Tranquille by Marseilles-based Robert Guédiguian, who made A la Place du Coeur. A hit in Venice last year, it's an ensemble piece - rather like Magnolia in a hard realist vein. Its main characters are a docker-turned-taxi driver and a middle-aged woman trying to keep her junkie daughter alive. It has the smack of reality, you might say, with brilliant performances by the director's usual rep players, including Ariane Ascaride. Sometimes the arguments about the downfall of the labour movement are a little on-the-nose, but Guédiguian spins his tragedy with a grace and complexity that finally leave you shaking. And so, to quote a leading French vampirologist: "Allez, salut maintenant."