Cinema: Carnival in Brio

Viva Maria! gives Brigitte Bardot one of the best roles of her career and Jeanne Moreau one of her worst. Fortunately, Moreau treats the handicap lightly, as if she were taking up tent-show theatricals just for the hell of it. Together, the two co-stars perform miracles of wit, charm and camera-wise witchery in this jaunty but slipshod farce written and directed by France's Louis Malle.

Maria! dusts off a sliver of plot about a team of carnival song-and-dance girls, both named Maria, touring the fleshpots of a mythical Central American republic in 1907. Enhancing a collection of dazzling period costumes, they inspire lust—and frequently satisfy it—from stop to stop. They invent the striptease, seizing with girlish delight upon a gaping seam and a stubborn snap as though the benefits to mankind might rival the discovery of radium. Finally, they fall jointly in love with a doomed revolutionary (George Hamilton) and continue to inflame the peasantry in his name. As Maria I, Moreau drolly helps the cause by improvising bits of the funeral oration from Julius Caesar, although most of the time she plays second banana to Maria II. A tomboyish Mata Hari who spent her childhood in Ireland as a mad bomber, Bardot gets the flashier jobs, manning a machine gun, planting high explosives, swinging from tree to tree like Tarzan.

Having saddled himself with an idea that often seems too silly for words, Director Malle rides to the rescue with more antistate, antichurch, antedated spoofery than he can gracefully handle. His rhythm is erratic, as though he were trying to make a movie in five or six different styles at the same time, none wholly his own. But even the deadly slow stretches are redeemed by Cameraman Henri Decae, whose breathtakingly sophisticated photography is a show in itself, imperceptibly shaded as the action moves from lush Rousseau tropics to the cabaret scenes that exude a smoky golden haze in which Moreau and Bardot appear like creatures of Lautrec or Degas, ineffably alluring.