Sexe Is a Four-Letter Word

"In a few days," said Franc,oise (Bonjour Tristesse) Sagan, "it will get better.'' That was five months ago in Monte Carlo, and since then Franc,oise's ballet Le Rendez-Vous Manque (The Broken Date) has been panned from Switzerland to Scollay Square. Nevertheless, it has the gift of survival. Last week Manhattan balletomanes got a chance to see why.

Sagan's story for Broken Date involves the trials of a confused young man who sits in his Paris apartment waiting for his assignation with a married American woman. When she fails to appear by 2 a.m., he decides that she has flown back to her husband in New York, lets himself be seduced in a bathroom by a sulphurous blonde in a purple cashmere pullover who has wandered into his place with a crowd of hipsters. Then he suffers the pangs of remorse that any real Frenchman would presumably feel at being unfaithful to another man's wife. He takes poison--just before the American finally shows up.

This beat-generation soap opera is strung together with a brassy and banal score by Composer Michel Magne, dressed in sets by Painter Bernard Buffet, and choreographed (by Americans John Taras and Don Lurio) for the most part like a Broadway musical. Visually (and for the box office), its handsomest parts belong to a splendidly configured blonde named Noelle Adam in a seductress role that fits her like a leotard. Best dancer in the company proved to be a regular of the Royal Danish Ballet named Toni Lander, who managed as the wife to make her final-act love scene with the dying hero far more evocative than blonde Dancer Adam's more celebrated writhings on a banister and around the rim of a bathtub.

Manhattan critics drubbed Broken Date lustily. Its theme, said the New York Times's John Martin, "seems to be that in France sexe is a four-letter word." It seemed as good an explanation as the one offered by Date's creators at its premiere. Explained Composer Magne, 28: "It recalls my youth." Said Novelist Sagan, 22: "It recalls my youth, too."

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