The film opens with François going to Carole’s Paris apartment to photograph her. But love is the drug in “Frontier of Dawn,” the thing that pulls people together, tears them apart and defines their relationship with other people and the world. Certainly that’s the case in America, where passion is often tempered with laughs (as in innumerable buddy romances) or becomes an excuse for sublimation (as in those orgies of consumption known as chick flicks). It seems strange to say, but even as cinemas of all national origins continue to find new and expressive ways to convey violence on screen, many now seem at a loss when it comes to love. The nakedness of this melancholy, its unvarnished, unapologetic blatancy, partly explains, I think, the difficulty some viewers have had with the film. “Frontier of Dawn” doesn’t reach the eloquent heights of either of those earlier titles, but it’s a lovely work, suffused with a deep melancholy that seems etched into each of its beautifully lighted images. Although many of his films remain out of easy reach for American viewers (a handful are available on DVD), the recent release of “Regular Lovers,” his heartbreaking 2005 look back at May 1968, and “I Don’t Hear the Guitar Anymore,” a crushing 1991 drama about his doomed affair with the singer Nico, have helped fill in the gaps. Garrel (born in 1948) has only lately begun to receive the attention he deserves in this country. One of the most important French filmmakers of the post-New Wave generation, Mr. Serious movies that insist on their own seriousness almost always face a difficult reception, whether they are intellectual puzzles or, like “Frontier of Dawn,” romantic cries from the heart. This isn’t new: Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura” was jeered at Cannes in 1960. His elliptical storytelling style probably explains some of the unhappy reactions the film earned after (and during) its first press screening at the Cannes Film Festival last May, though the ghost didn’t help. Garrel connects so loosely that they feel more like moments out of time than narrative fragments. There’s more, including madness, electroshock treatment, a discussion about the cost of baby diapers, and the sudden emergence of a ghost in a mirror, all of which Mr. After his affair ends with Carole (Laura Smet), a famous actress given to flare-ups and meltdowns, he immerses himself in a new life with Eve (Clémentine Poidatz), who promises him a child and perhaps a chance at real happiness. Love is a universe of two in Philippe Garrel’s fatalistic romance “Frontier of Dawn.” Shot in richly textured and contrasting black-and-white celluloid, it centers on a young photographer, François (Louis Garrel, the filmmaker’s son), and the two women with whom he finds and loses love.