Joyride

By Frank Rich

CAT AND MOUSE

Directed and Written by Claude Lelouch

Claude Lelouch must be the happiest man in the world. In his films, the characters are unfailingly kind and attractive, the food is always three-star and the settings make Dufy landscapes look like teeming slums. Not even death can cloud his sunny disposition. Though Lelouch's Cat and Mouse is a murder mystery, complete with bloodied corpse, it is resolutely benign: the many bad guys are as charming as their victims. One doubts that Lelouch would recognize evil if it smashed him in the face.

Since most adults do not share this director's unquenchable optimism, even his best movies tend to be an acquired taste. Cat and Mouse is his best film in a long while, but like A Man and a Woman and Happy New Year, it only works on its own sentimental terms. Look for deeper, darker meanings and you'll discover a vacuum. Luckily, Lelouch makes it easy for an audience to succumb to his fluff. His sincerity is so complete and his style so lyrical that all but the terminally cynical can suspend disbelief and enlist in the joyride.

The tour leader for the pleasures of Cat and Mouse is a dapper veteran detective, Lechat (Serge Reggiani), who goes on a wild chase to discover whether a philandering millionaire (Jean-Pierre Aumont) was indeed murdered by his jealous wife (Michele Morgan). The plot is complex and at times ingenious, but it is mainly an excuse for Lelouch to indulge his romantic reveries. Almost every character in the film falls in love at least once, usually with idyllic effect. The liaisons are delightfully improbable. Antagonists Reggiani and Morgan both carry on with gorgeous lovers half their age before making a beeline for each other; Lechat's daughter (Christine Laurent) marries his partner (Philippe Leotard) right after their first blind date. Though Lelouch is too discreet to show any of these couples in bed, he composes his own eroticism out of Normandy sunlight, knowing glances and Francis Lai's typically catchy musical score.

The stars are as engaging as the director demands. Morgan, here returning to the screen after an eight-year absence, makes the chic middle-aged murder suspect an aloof yet touching figure: she always retains her bourgeois hauteur, but we see the pain of her predict ament in the slight flickering of her large blue eyes. Reggiani is a delight. With his hound-dog face and wry manner, he is every bit as amusingly world-weary as Happy New Year's hero, Lino Ven tura. No wonder all the other characters openly adore him.

The real star of Cat and Mouse, though, is Lelouch. He has taken a vi brant hand to his material, lacing the action with playful flashbacks and trompe l'oeil effects that wittily complicate the narrative's central puzzle. There is even a brief and hilariously titled film-within-the-film that parodies Cat and Mouse's own detective genre. If, in the end, the movie is far longer on charm than thrills, it is simply because the director refuses to hype any of the scary elements of the story. Much to his credit, Claude Lelouch would rather lose part of the audience than be unfaithful to his own benevolent self

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