And So to Bed

By JAY COCKS

LOVE AT THE TOP

Directed by MICHEL DEVILLE Screenplay by CHRISTOPHER FRANK

Nicholas is a minor functionary in a big business and, like many another minor functionary, is torn between towering ambition and cowering timidity. How can a man be a Mitty and an Uebermensch simultaneously? Nicholas (Jean-Louis Trintignant) cannot even get the right sandwich for lunch. He meekly accepts what the harried counterman passes over to him and spends the rest of the noon hour in a park, where an attendant tries to charge him for a bench he is not sitting on. When he spots an interesting female, his approach is promising, probably because it has been well rehearsed. "You're looking," he tells a statuesque model of a girl (Jane Birkin), "for someone who doesn't exist." She responds, not seeming to mind as his inspiration falters and he becomes flustered. She is used to worse, Nicholas shortly and angrily discovers, because she is a whore.

Life would be only a series of such sorry revelations for Nicholas without the support of his friend Fabre (Jean-Pierre Cassel), a creator of unsuccessful fictions. Like most failed novelists, Fabre is bitter. He sits in a cafe all day, his crippled foot hidden under the table, nursing along a grenadine and milk ("with a drop of cassis") and trying to live vicariously through Nicholas. Indeed, he transforms Nicholas into the protagonist of a novel that is lived, not written. He tells him what to do, where to go, how to talk, whom to pursue, when to woo. Soon after quitting his humble job to follow Fabre's precepts, Nicholas becomes wildly, improbably successful. He also becomes a vicious, amoral predator, the corroded vessel of all Fabre's frustration and hate.

Nicholas is the definitive antihero; he is also the definitive cliche. No wonder Fabre's life is a rubble of rejection slips. Unfortunately, the people who made Love at the Top have not demonstrated the same critical wisdom as Fabre's prospective publishers. They are swept away by the power of such insights as material success corrupts; bedfellows make strange politics; and cash calms many qualms. Director Michel Deville (Benjamin) preaches his simplistic, satiric sermon with the help of a number of attractive women (Romy Schneider, Florinda Bolkan, Miss Birkin), who lend the movie a certain substance by getting undressed as often as possible. Jay Cocks

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