Live for Life

French Director Claude Lelouch's un abashed romanticism brought A Man and a Woman to within an inch of the border between sentiment and sentimen tality. In Live for Life, he crosses over the line -- and back into the land of the Woman's Picture, where men must wander and ladies must weep, alone. The movie's hero is a bored, lecherous French television reporter (Yves Montand) who perpetually roams from his aging wife (Annie Girardot) on journeys to the Congo or the Orient, searching for stories. Though he apparently has his pick of every female in Paris, Montand eventually limits his love life to two: Girardot and a beautiful but blank American model (Candice Bergen). Considering the women's performances, the choice is roughly comparable to claret v. Coca-Cola; inexplicably, he chooses Coke.

Candy is not dandy for long; fighting the old ennui, Montand takes on a new assignment in Viet Nam. After he is listed as missing, wife and mistress separately recall the husband-lover who may be dead. Girardot muses over a few dry scraps of memories, while Bergen recites a maundering monologue: "I think I lost my youth ... a man of 40 stole it ... I'll fall in love with an American from Houston or Memphis . . . have children named John or Elizabeth . . ." After such a drizzly forecast, it is no wonder that when Montand is released by the Viet Cong, he heads straight for home and wife.

To give his slow story some contrapuntal rhythm and social significance, Lelouch cuts from shots of the triangle (filmed in Technicolor), to monochromatic scenes of conflict in Africa and Asia, presumably covered by the hero. The vulgar-cliche style of these sequences can only be described in Nabokov's term, "poshlost." The reporter self-righteously editorializes: "The Nazis tortured because of a guilty conscience from oppressing Europe during the war . . . In Viet Nam, the U.S. is in the same situation ..." Meanwhile the horrors of battle are shown in pictures as stilted as window displays, the blood stylistically spattered as if war were not war but a magazine color spread.

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