Cinema: Director's Diary

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Take It All, entitled A Tout Prendre in its original French-language version, was made several years ago by an ostentatiously sensitive French Canadian, Claude Jutra, 36. The movie is deep-dyed autobiography, Jutra's freehand account of his longer thoughts about life and love ("That which we give to a beloved, we give without relinquishing"), his swinging existence among Montreal's young bohemians, his secret fears (hoodlums with blazing guns mostly, a sort of Mafia of man's subconscious) and, more prominently, his delicious intimacy with a show-stopping mulatto model named Johanne, who plays herself.

Playing opposite her, Jutra outdoes himself in celebrating the girl's dusky feline beauty. Johanne meets him, moves in with him, gets pregnant by him, narrowly averts "a $200 operation" before he goes away and leaves her. Though intrinsically commonplace, their affair is cinematically modish, caught by cameramen who appear to shoot from the hip, doting on closeups, picking up lots of outdoor mist and indoor cigarette smoke at unexpected angles.

Already showered with avant-garde kudos, Take It All seems to be based on the assumption that a very personal movie will be automatically honest, alive and exciting. Instead, Jutra's wordy confessional sounds as though something may have been lost by rendering it into English, and often looks like a smattering of Jean-Luc Godard uneasily combined with the self-absorption of Fellini's 8½ or the glib self-exposure of Arthur Miller's After the Fall. "I wish only to move, surprise, provoke," Jutra has written. "The important thing in life is to have fun. The rest is a hoax." Unhappily, the mirror he holds up to his own life reflects precious little fun. After a while, like any autobiographer who fails to make his subject interesting, he resembles a man absorbed in the act of shaving.