Sad

By J.C.

JACQUES BREL IS ALIVE AND WELL AND LIVING IN PARIS

Directed by DENIS HEROUX Screenplay by ERIC BLAU

In One, Two, Three, Billy Wilder's cold-war farce, Horst Bucholz was held captive by ruthless commissars intent on prying secret information out of him. He resisted, at least initially. Then the villains immured him in a room with a phonograph that kept playing over and over It Was an Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini. His will frayed, his sanity shot, Bucholz broke.

Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris suggests a similar means of torture. Imagine being imprisoned for life inside one of those actively gloomy cabarets where the only entertainment is French popular music. Whatever the glories of France, popular music was never among them. Whether ballad or brassy show-stopper or (deliver us) rock 'n' roll, every French pop song sounds as if it is being pulled out of an accordion. Those who cannot imagine what the ordeal might be like but are still curious should check out Jacques Brel. Others might well beware.

Brel writes bombastic ballads about love and loss and even larger issues, such as old age, war and redemption. Brel is not modest, and neither are the people who honor him here. The songs have lots of volume but no energy or pith. The film's notion of mise en scene is to have one number--about sons--staged in front of a trio of crosses from which dangle three uncomfortable youths.

The cast, in its entirety, consists of Joe Masiell, who sounds, as convention demands, as if he were chanting from the bottom of a rain barrel; Mort Schuman, who comes on tousled and puppyish and is presumably available for comic relief; and Elly Stone. Miss Stone is what Variety might call a diminutive thrush. She is at pains to assure us, however, that she is mighty of spirit. In every song she gives it all she's got. In her case, this amounts to two wide eyes, a loud voice and a battery of emotional gestures that range from wringing her hands to flinging her arms wide apart, as if to guard against being crushed by invisible cathedral doors.

M. Brel himself shows up looking appropriately dour, cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth in the accepted Gallic manner. He slouches over a beer and sings one of his best-known tunes, Ne Me Quittes Pas, which we might translate roughly as "Please Don't Split." This is the first number after the film's intermission. It would have been more appropriate, even more poignant, if it had come just before. sbJ.C.

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