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It takes a few beats to get through the quaint setup in “The Salt of Tears” and recognize its protagonist is an asshole. That’s Luc (sullen newcomer Logann Antuofermo), the young aspiring cabinetmaker at the center of French director Philippe Garrel’s latest stab at generational angst and ill-fated love. Over the course of this spry black-and-white sketch of a movie, Luc seduces one woman, rekindles love with another, and rejects them both for a third before everything finally collapses on top of him. There’s not a lot of sophistication to Luc’s arc, as his self-centered universe of problems accelerates to grating extremes, but

Few filmmakers have held as tight to their themes as Garrel, who has cranked out intimate portraits of young men doomed by delusions of romantic grandeur for decades. Though the filmmaker technically completed his so-called “trilogy of love” with 2017’s “Lover for a Day,...