The film stars Jeanne Moreau. Barocco (1976) Téchiné demonstrated his penchant for atmospheric storytelling with his next film, the thriller Barocco (1976), a crime drama. A boxer who accepted and then turned down a huge bribe from a politician to tell a lie that would influence an election is killed by a hired assassin. The boxer's girlfriend eventually falls in love with the killer while trying to remake him into the image of her slain lover. The film elicited critical plaudits for its elegant look. Les sœurs Brontë (1979) Three years later, Téchiné took on biography with Les sœurs Brontë The Bronte Sisters (1979), a profile of the Brontë sisters. The film's heavy, repressive mood evokes the harshness and injustice of the life the sisters endured. The passion and color that is so vivid in their novels was absent from their daily existence, and the film's gloomy cinematography evokes this. The film features an all-star cast: Isabelle Adjani, Marie-France Pisier and Isabelle Huppert as Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, and Pascal Greggory as their ill-fated brother Branwell. Hôtel des Amériques (1981) Hôtel des Amériques (1981), set in Biarritz, explores the strained relationship between a successful middle-aged woman and an unfulfilled and emotionally unbalanced man in a story of hopelessly ill-matched love. This film marked a turning point in Téchiné's career, anchoring his work in a more realistic universe than the previous romantic one. For the first time Téchiné let his actors improvise, a practice he has continued ever since, adjusting his scripts to accommodate the new material. “From Hôtel des Amériques onwards my films are no longer genre films,” he said. “My inspiration is no longer drawn from the cinema”. This film also started a long productive collaboration with Catherine Deneuve. "There are some directors who are more feminine than others, like Téchiné, like Truffaut. They are an exceptional gift to actresses," Deneuve has said. Rendez-vous (1985) After making the television production La Matiouette ou l'arrière-pays (1983), Téchiné returned to critical attention with Rendez-vous (1985), a noir melodrama replete with the seductive surface of the era. In the film a would-be actress, Nina, fleeing her provincial home for Paris, enters a turbulent love relationship with a sadistic, self-destructive young actor who caused the death of his former girlfriend. When the actor himself is killed in an accident, or possible suicide, his former mentor/director, and father of the dead girlfriend, determines