Cinema: Flaky Farce

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PARDON MON AFFAIRE

Directed by YVES ROBERT Screenplay by JEAN-LOUP DABADIE

Pardon Mon Affaire is one of those sex farces that the French seem to be able to whip up like croissants — airy, pleasant and a little flaky. Because it is something of a standard product, it is also rather predictable. When a married bureaucrat (Jean Rochefort) conceives a passion for a flashy Paris model (Anny Duperey), we have no doubt that he is going to bed her in the final reel — after first undergoing a series of ritual humiliations befitting a middle-aged fool who tries to play the swinger.

Rochefort brings some freshness even to obligatory scenes like the one in which he must face his officemates decked out in a plum-colored suit, mod haircut and hip new manner. Nodding his head to an imaginary cool beat, he has the odd, rueful grace of a stork with something caught in its throat, and we can almost believe, that a young girl's heart would indeed go out to him.

Director Robert (The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe) juggles sever al subplots that are sometimes amusing but do nothing for the film's cohesiveness. The main one involves Rochefort's three colleagues in adultery — a sort of Gallic answer to John Cassavetes' Hus bands. Their best scene: on a prank, one of them wreaks havoc in a fancy restaurant by flailing about disguised as a blind man. Then, after further appalling on lookers by lurching off into the night be hind the wheel of a car, he murmurs to his pals, "It was more fun at Chauveron."

Christopher Porterfield