AT A FORMAL DINNER PARTY HELD in the grand courtyard of the Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida--imagine St. Mark's Square with manicured gardens and lots more statuary--the lights of French cinema were strutting their stuff. Jean-Pierre Leaud, once the youthful star of Francois Truffaut's films, stalked about like a mad, Gallic Sherlock Holmes. Stephane Audran, the femme fatale of Claude Chabrol's classic melodramas, glided from one table to another--a smiling, regal presence. Fabrice Luchini, pensive hero of La Discrete, heard the band play some oldtime rock 'n' roll and lurched into a wild, hilarious boogaloo solo. Menace, glamour, energy: that night the French paraded it all.

Onscreen it was another matter. French filmmakers watch what their pumped-up Hollywood colleagues produce and say, "Merci, non." As indicated by the 19 new features chosen by U.S. film critic Molly Haskell for the Seventh Annual Sarasota French Film Festival that ended last week, their movies are intimate, postcoital, withdrawn. Even visual pyrotechnics, with which the New Wave directors caught the world's attention in the late '50s, are disdained; it's as if the camera itself is unwilling to be embarrassed by displays of exuberance. Hollywood makes hypermovies, while France has become the un-cinema.

But understatement has its attractions. That's why film critics and other movie lovers flock to this Gulf Coast resort each November. To watch the discreet charms and anxieties of the bourgeoisie unveiled, ever so tactfully, is to enjoy a cool, refreshing sorbet in the red-meat banquet of mainstream movies. To listen to the off-kilter comic dialogue in, say, Pierre Salvadori's slight, delightful Les Apprentis (The Apprentices) is to overhear two friends conversing as they do in life but rarely, alas, onscreen. To follow the footsteps of Virginie Ledoyen in La Fille Seule (A Single Girl) or pop star Vanessa Paradis in Elisa is to be mesmerized by the variety of gorgeous actresses in French films--a reminder that there is no lover more attentive to the mystery of womanhood than the movie camera.

In the old days that meant a Frenchman behind the camera, but in recent years women directors have almost achieved parity. Their presence is so taken for granted that they needn't make shrill feminist statements. For example, Christine Pascal's Adultere: Mode d'Emploi (Adultery: A User's Guide) is much more sympathetic to the male characters, whether they are philanderers or drug dealers, than to the women, and its frank, kinky sex scenes are shown from the men's emotional viewpoint. Daniele Dubroux's twisty Le Journal d'un Seducteur (Diary of a Seducer) sees its sexually innocent men and experienced women as separate but equal figures of fun. Only Gazon Maudit (French Twist), Josiane Balasko's cunning, robust farce about a married woman who takes a lesbian as a lover, is forthrightly pro-female. Yet this is a mature sex comedy: everyone, man or woman, straight or gay, has the right to be silly once in a while.

Gazon Maudit is at heart about three people who, despite themselves, create a family. The two finest films at Sarasota were about families--one at fever pitch, the other in twilight reminiscence. Robert Guediguian's A la Vie, a la Mort (Till Death Do Us Part), set in Marseilles, is a passionate portrait of a brood torn by poverty and resentment yet united in their need to dream of a better life; blood conquers all. In Laurent Benegui's enchanting Au Petit Marguery, chef Michel Aumont and his wife Stephane Audran decide to close the restaurant they have run for 25 years; they invite their grown children and friends for one last meal. A huge cast of sharply defined characters teems through this sweet movie with an undertaste of sadness. Serving up bountiful portions of hearty laughs and hot tears, Au Petit Marguery was the discovery of the festival.

"Life isn't the beginning or the end," someone says in A la Vie, a la Mort. "It's the in-between." In French cinema it is the small pleasures--the in-between moments--that are often the most memorable. A few from Sarasota: the wonderful cameo by Leaud in Le Journal d'un Seducteur as the frenetic host of a bizarre party; the blithe obsession expressed by Luchini in Philippe Le Guay's L'Annee Juliette (The Juliet Year) as he tries to escape all social responsibilities by inventing a dream girl; the willful, doomed radiance of Emmanuelle Beart--perhaps the most beautiful woman on film--in Regis Wargnier's Une Femme Francaise (A French Woman); and, in La Fille Seule, the sight of two young people in a cafe, arguing like a couple that have been unhappily married for 50 years.

The French and American film communities are often like that couple: partners and rivals, with much that separates them and much more to share. For members of both groups to spend a few days together in Sarasota is a tonic for all. They get to compare notes, exchange suspicions and, on a balmy evening, party till dawn.