Cinema: The Spring Collection from Paris

Buddies, ballrooms and counterfeit bills in four French films

LEBAL

Oh how we danced . . . through half a century of French history in one Paris ball room. The songs change along with the styles of dress and behavior. Only the faces remain the same. Twelve men and ten women dance to the music of their times: the Popular Front of 1936, the Occupation of 1940, the Liberation of '44, the G.I. invasion of '46, the first rock-'n'-roll siege in '56, the student uprising of May '68, all as refracted through the cracked prism of the Mitterrand '80s.

Le Bal has no dialogue —only song, dance and wallflower vignettes. A forlorn aristocrat fishes his monocle out of a champagne glass, fixes it in his eye, and one bubbly tear slides down his face. A 1930s hard-boiled hero, based on the young Jean Gabin, reappears 20 years later as the aging Gabin's Inspector Maigret. There is plenty of verve here but little charm; the relentless closeups favored by Director Ettore Scola (A Special Day, La Nuit de Varennes) turn every character into a comic-pathetic gargoyle. It is left to the nostalgic sound track to evoke the emotions of a nation as the Na zis stormed in and the Americans took over and the Revolution failed . . . and the band played on.

L'ARGENT

Walking into a Robert Bresson film can be like waking up on top of Mount Everest: the air is thin and chilly, no living thing disturbs the silence, and the view is spectacularly disconcerting. Bresson's bleak tales (Pickpocket, The Trial of Joan of Arc, Mouchette) make high-altitude demands. Even the most adventurous viewer is The theme of L'Argent, oxygen Bresson's 13th film in a 50-year career, is both simple and brutal: capitalism is a contagious disease, and the carrier is money. Bourgeois parents reward their sons for lying about money. The surest way out of a sticky situation is bribery. Currency is as counterfeit as the system it supports. A young man (Christian Patey) unknowingly passes a phony 500-franc note, but be cause his stubborn rectitude marks him as an alien in the kingdom of greed, he must suf fer an almost comic series of calamities: fired from his job, then jailed, then abandoned by his wife (Caroline Lang). His child must die. Finally, his spirit purified into psychosis, Yvon must kill.

Bresson, a technician of metaphysics, is fascinated by the machinery of injustice. Everything from a bank's cash dispenser to the French legal system to a finely honed ax is considered for its practical application. Nothing works, except for Bresson's own favorite machine, the movie camera; like Yvon, it refuses to counterfeit obeisance to a society motivated by its own corruption. Bresson, too, regards humanity with the ferocious passivity of a stone lion on some abandoned antique isle. At 76 he has made his most serene and terrifying film to date, one that strikes at its target like a bolt of judgment flung from an Olympus on Mars.

LES COMPERES

Francis Veber believes in machinery too:

the ageless contrivances of farce. Here, as in his scripts for La Cage aux Folles, L 'Emmerdeur (remade in the U.S. as Buddy Buddy) and Partners, Veber throws a tough guy and a soft guy into an improbable stew, mixes identities, spices with a gangster or two and stirs to a giddy boil.