The Visitors Take Sarasota

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After last year's superserious Sarasota festival -- in every movie somebody seemed to have AIDS -- programmer Molly Haskell was pleased to pepper the '93 edition with comedies. Claude Lelouch's Tout Ca . . . Pour Ca!!! (All This . . . for That!!!) is overstocked with plot but has a genial, musical-comedy air and a flock of attractive performers. Patrice Leconte's Tango is an essay in rollicking misogyny, as three bourgeois gentlemen (Philippe Noiret, Thierry Lhermitte, Richard Bohringer) scheme to kill or seduce every beautiful woman in their path. Coline Serreau's La Crise (Crisis) puts her hero through a double whammy -- he loses his wife and his job on the same morning -- then winds the clockwork of comedy plotting so tight it almost explodes. That it doesn't is due to Serreau's gift of always surprising her audience by twisting characters from comic stereotypes into desperate humans, like the woman who explains why she got fed up with her "perfect" marriage, or the sad fellow obsessed with workouts and hair transplants because "When I'm perfect, someone will love me."

Serreau, with Trois Hommes et un Couffin (Three Men and a Cradle) and Romuald et Juliette, is a treasured comedy commodity in France. Sarasota also welcomed a gifted new writer-director, Pierre Salvadori, 29. His short film Menage is a little ironic delight about a fastidious housecleaner and a messy friend with suicide in mind. Salvadori's first feature, Cible Emouvante (Wild Target), makes good on the short film's promise. This deft, subtle, endlessly inventive farce stars Jean Rochefort, the great basset hound of French cinema, as a professional killer who meets his match with two women: his homicidal ! mother (the great chanteuse Patachou) and a glamorous thief (Marie Trintignant). Guillaume Depardieu, Gerard's son, is part of the show -- which is almost stolen by a hilariously wary parrot.

Wild Target is clever enough to be remade, and devalued, in Hollywood, but it deserves better. More deftly and buoyantly than The Visitors, it follows the rules for a French film with potentially universal appeal: Give your audience a little thought, a little social commentary and of course a little sex. But always leave 'em laughing.