Cinema: Fun Anarchy

WHY NOT!

Directed and Written by Coline Serreau

This is the latest in a growing genre of French movies (Going Places, Cousin, Cousine, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs) in which superficially attractive people treat one another with casual, often thoughtless cruelty, but overlay this behavior with farcical charm.

In the present instance a pair of bisexual males (Sami Frey and Mario Gonzalez) are cohabiting with a dim but agreeable young woman (Christine Murillo).

They don't have much money, and Frey, the housekeeping member of the trio, is constantly appalled by his roommates' sloppy ways. Otherwise life is cheerful, until the Frey character meets another young woman (Nicole Jamet) and sets about turning the maison a trois into a maison a quatre. Needless to say he doesn't bother to explain the rules and arrangements to the new recruit, and much unhappiness results from this lack of forthright communication. Eventually, because this is supposed to be a comedy, things are set to order (the new girl stays), and everyone settles down to a mutual misunderstanding.

The quirky sexual relationships of the group are never presented as anything less than humane and pleasant. Niceness, however, does not quite cover the fact that the Jamet character is kept in ignorance of her true situation and, in her innocence, exploited. There is also some rather ugly background information that leads one to believe that Housekeeper Frey may be a good deal more psychotic in his motivations than the movie cares to admit openly, while his male companion may be somewhat more than charmingly antisocial in some of his. The movie is, finally, quite dishonest: an antibourgeois tract that is far from forthright in admitting where it's coming from or what it's aiming at. When the chuckles die, what remains is an uncertain moral and a certain queasiness.

R.S.