Cinema: A Man, a Woman and Some Dogs

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By their films shall ye know them. Looking at any national cinema, a viewer inevitably sketches a personality profile of that country: its mood and tempo, its political priorities, its sense of humor (if any) and, above all, its attitudes toward sex and romance. Americans, to judge from the movies they make and attend, are fast, rough, raunchy lovers -- backseat studs and born- to-thrill prom queens. Canadians cannot decide whether to imitate American energy or British reserve. Germans are dogmatic and ironic by turns; and the men snore in bed, but only, as one of them explains, "to protect their women from wild animals." As for the French, who didn't invent love but certainly know how to market it, they negotiate their affairs with a roue's smile and a fatalist's shrug. C'est l'amour. C'est la vie.

In 1966 Claude Lelouch synthesized every foreigner's view of French love with A Man and a Woman, the Paris-to-Deauville erotic express in which the plangent hearts of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee beat to an inane, unforgettable score. The picture was a worldwide hit, won a couple of Oscars and provided upscale young couples with an excuse to drive fast and twirl rapturously on the beach. Now Lelouch has reunited his stars for A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later. Aimee, whose features have calcified chicly, is a movie producer desperate to make a musical version of their tryst. Trintignant, who looks weary and has every reason to be, gets lost in the desert and is rescued by Bedouins. One young actress, Evelyne Bouix, looks the fitting image of Aimee; another, Marie-Sophie Pochat, weeps becomingly. Everything else is a stupid botch. For those who loved A Man and a Woman, and for those who thought it was swank swill, this is a movie to avoid.

Perhaps the French are better at family affairs. Trintignant's wife Nadine makes a decent domestic comedy-weepie called Next Summer; Trintignant appears in the film, as do their beyond-gorgeous daughter Marie and Nadine's brother Christian Marquand. They all provide support for Philippe Noiret, as the aging philanderer at the film's heart. While Noiret's exquisite wife (Claudia Cardinale) is giving birth to their sixth child, he luxuriates in the ardor of his latest bimbette. What his wife sees as playing around, he sees as just playing -- and how natural for this overgrown bear of a little boy, this Ewok of genial lust. His eldest daughter (Fanny Ardant) is sympathetic but admonitory: "No man, especially a good man, can keep two women happy." He does, though. He keeps his daughters happy and his wife almost forgiving. In embracing these Gallic cliches, Next Summer creates an imaginary ideal family, one with adulteries, frustrations and near fatal diseases, but also love, loyalty, intelligence, passion, beauty. It's Father Knows Best in the French style.