Cinema: Pourquoi?

She moves so easily, with such knowing grace; she walks in metric beauty, through her mellowing lover's elegant world—through it and beyond, at last, to younger, stronger, more passionate arms. But then she goes back to the other guy.

Ah well, that's Catherine Deneuve for you. At least that's the Deneuve of late, for while La Chamade is based on a Françoise Sagan novel, it somewhat resembles Belle de Jour and, to a lesser extent, The April Fools. But it lacks the surrealistic pathology of Belle and the slick American romance of Fools. Its milieu, instead, is the typical Sagan domain of croquet on Parisian lawns and seaside Scrabble on the Cote d'Azur, of cliquishness and banal cleverness ("I'm wearing black because it's so gay"), of highly polished and muted passions.

That domain, which is also the habitat of her lover Charles (Michel Piccoli), begins to bore Lucile, and so she starts spending her afternoons with handsome, earnest young Antoine (Roger Van Hool). Before long, he insists that she choose between them. "Pourquoi?" pouts Lucile, and the limits of her horizons are drawn a bit more clearly. She knows that Charles will have her back any time she likes, so she moves in with Antoine. Antoine obliges her to take a job; soon, too, she is pregnant. She decides she does not like the realities of this world either, so she quits her job, aborts her child and deserts Antoine.

Chamade is not the story of a shattered romance (Antoine will recover) or of true reunion (Charles may not have Lucile back for long). In fact it is less a story of love than one of selfishness. Lucile is something of a child, largely ignorant of her own selfishness and of the fact that she is indulging herself. She brings no malice to her liaisons because she is too empty-headed (she prefers hazy) to be a femme fatale. The really selfish one is Antoine, who tries to make Lucile over to his own specifications. Charles? He has reached an age where resignation and selfishness coincide: he can hope to keep the girl only by letting her be.

To so shallow a role and so bland a story Deneuve brings, of course, her exquisite face and presence—eerily evocative of a warmer Grace Kelly. There is something incongruous about a 9-to-5 Deneuve; she knows it, and plays straight a brief scene where, as Tired Working Girl, she soaks her feet in a basin. The day she quits her job she leaps back into bed—fully clothed. These moments lend life to a minor, if remarkably accurate evocation of a certain sort of life. But it gives Deneuve a chance only to mark time until she can slip into something less comfortable.