New Year Celebration

By JAY COCKS

LA BONNE ANNEE

Direction and

Screenplay by CLAUDE LELOUCH

Although Claude Lelouch has made more than a dozen movies, he is probably still best known for A Man and a Woman (1966), a nighty piece of soft-focus romance that had a marked influence on the makers of television commercials. This new Lelouch film is also a wistful, rather melancholy love story, but it is more hard-edged and realistic, better by several furlongs than A Man and a Woman-to which indeed it appears to be a kind of reply.

La Bonne Annee (Happy New Year) begins with black-and-white footage from A Man and a Woman loudly mocked by a group of convicts, who are being shown the film at Christmastime. One of them, Simon (Lino Ventura), regards the proceedings on screen with skepticism that borders on disgust. Soon after, hi the sort of unlikely stroke that frequently occurred in A Man and a Woman, Simori is pardoned from his prison sentence as sort of an official holiday gift.

He returns to Paris, wonders whether to call Franchise (Frangoise Fabian), who has been waiting for him, and instead goes to her apartment. He hides when he hears someone else coming in -another man. Simon sneaks out. Much of the rest of the film is a reconstruction of how he and Frangoise met and fell in love.

In the flashbacks, Simon plans an elaborate scheme to burgle the Riviera branch of Van Cleef & Arpels; Frangoise, an antique dealer, thinks him a businessman but suspects otherwise. Her suspicions, and her attraction to Simon's unpretentiousness, prove seductive. When he is caught in the back room of Van Cleef s, Frangoise pledges to wait for him. It is a familiar enough situation, but it is given novelty by Frangoise's ambition "to live like a man" -to enjoy the freedoms generally granted only to the male sex. What gives La Bonne Annee much of its real grace and melancholy charm is Simon's struggle to grasp this and, when he returns from prison, to accept Franchise's explanation for the presence of another man and of other, men in the past: "It was my way of waiting-of staying alive."

Lelouch forsakes the giddy sentimentality of A Man and a Woman for a relationship that is full of pride, injury and human compromise. Ventura and the ravishing Mme. Fabian bring dignity and depth to their roles, and Lelouch allows them the time and the latitude to develop their characterizations. The movie ends, memorably, on a close-up of Simon's face as he struggles to understand that Frangoise's insistence on her own needs and identity while he was in prison does not preclude a real and en during love for him. Lelouch never fur nishes more than a hint about whether Simon will ever understand, much less accept this. But he, Ventura and Fabi an have succeeded nicely in making it all matter.

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