Aimez-Vous Maxim's?

Goodbye Again (Litvak; United Artists) is an American film in the sense that the U.S. is where the money to make it came from, but otherwise it is thoroughly French. That is to say, all of its important scenes take place in restaurants or automobiles. There was a time when all important scenes in French movies took place in bedrooms, but in De Gaulle's Fifth Republic this is no longer true--except for Brigitte Bardot films, and Brigitte, of course, is only for tourists. The most important cars are a forceful but overstated Facel-Vega in which Yves Montand takes Ingrid Bergman for drives, and a giddy Triumph roadster in which Anthony Perkins takes Ingrid for drives. The starring restaurant, to which Perkins takes Ingrid for meals, naturally is Maxim's. But the Deauville Casino does creditably in the supporting role of the place where Montand, consumed with jealousy, docks his doxies.

Goodbye Again is the film version of Franc,oise Sagan's novel, Aimez-Vous Brahms. In it, Montand is required to pretend that he is a middle-aged trucking executive who, after five years as Ingrid's lover, prefers to spend his time with younger models. Ingrid has a lugubrious affair with Perkins, a spoiled young loafer, after he lures her to a concert with the mysteriously seductive incantation, "Aimez-vous Brahms?" There is a letup in the mooning when Perkins' exasperated boss asks him what the trouble is. "I just realized I've never been in love before," says the bemused one. "Well I have," says his employer, urging strongly that he get back to work.

Instead he gets back to Ingrid, who, after wasting a lot of expensive gasoline and misting into a lot of high-priced caviar, gets back to Montand. Because everyone in the film registers constant anguish, Goodbye Again will be called a woman's picture--but not, one may lay odds, by many women.

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