A Man, a Woman and Some Dogs

By RICHARD CORLISS

By their films shall ye know them. Looking at any national cinema, a viewer inevitably sketches a personality profile of that country: its mood and tempo, its political priorities, its sense of humor (if any) and, above all, its attitudes toward sex and romance. Americans, to judge from the movies they make and attend, are fast, rough, raunchy lovers -- backseat studs and born- to-thrill prom queens. Canadians cannot decide whether to imitate American energy or British reserve. Germans are dogmatic and ironic by turns; and the men snore in bed, but only, as one of them explains, "to protect their women from wild animals." As for the French, who didn't invent love but certainly know how to market it, they negotiate their affairs with a roue's smile and a fatalist's shrug. C'est l'amour. C'est la vie.

In 1966 Claude Lelouch synthesized every foreigner's view of French love with A Man and a Woman, the Paris-to-Deauville erotic express in which the plangent hearts of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimee beat to an inane, unforgettable score. The picture was a worldwide hit, won a couple of Oscars and provided upscale young couples with an excuse to drive fast and twirl rapturously on the beach. Now Lelouch has reunited his stars for A Man and a Woman: 20 Years Later. Aimee, whose features have calcified chicly, is a movie producer desperate to make a musical version of their tryst. Trintignant, who looks weary and has every reason to be, gets lost in the desert and is rescued by Bedouins. One young actress, Evelyne Bouix, looks the fitting image of Aimee; another, Marie-Sophie Pochat, weeps becomingly. Everything else is a stupid botch. For those who loved A Man and a Woman, and for those who thought it was swank swill, this is a movie to avoid.

Perhaps the French are better at family affairs. Trintignant's wife Nadine makes a decent domestic comedy-weepie called Next Summer; Trintignant appears in the film, as do their beyond-gorgeous daughter Marie and Nadine's brother Christian Marquand. They all provide support for Philippe Noiret, as the aging philanderer at the film's heart. While Noiret's exquisite wife (Claudia Cardinale) is giving birth to their sixth child, he luxuriates in the ardor of his latest bimbette. What his wife sees as playing around, he sees as just playing -- and how natural for this overgrown bear of a little boy, this Ewok of genial lust. His eldest daughter (Fanny Ardant) is sympathetic but admonitory: "No man, especially a good man, can keep two women happy." He does, though. He keeps his daughters happy and his wife almost forgiving. In embracing these Gallic cliches, Next Summer creates an imaginary ideal family, one with adulteries, frustrations and near fatal diseases, but also love, loyalty, intelligence, passion, beauty. It's Father Knows Best in the French style.

Noiret is engaging and expansive; Delphine (Marie Riviere), the heroine of Eric Rohmer's Summer, is willfully implosive. A love affair has wilted, her job is a dead end, and here it is July and she has no plans for her summer vacation. Friends offer help; she mopes. Cherbourg, the Alps and Biarritz spread their charms under her nose; she sniffs. People she meets try to make her laugh; she sobs. Her only hope is to glimpse that natural phenomenon known as the "green ray." Rohmer daubs every image with green -- clothes, cafe walls, the sea and, in a certain light, Delphine's sad eyes -- but since Summer was shot in grainy 16 mm, one has the impression of looking at a French postcard through a screen door. The elegant chat and mature obsessions that marked My Night at Maud's and Claire's Knee have given way to Delphine's raging petulance. Yet his devotion to this pretty, sorry mess of a Parisienne ultimately pays off. If Delphine doesn't get on your nerves, she may get under your skin.

Sandy Wilcox (Margaret Langrick), the heroine of My American Cousin, is worlds more grown-up than Delphine. Sure, she is only twelve and stuck in remotest British Columbia in the summer of '59, when everyone else is heavy petting to a Chuck Berry mating call. And yes, Sandy has a case on her older cousin from California (John Wildman), who slicks his blond hair back into a d.a. and drives a red Caddy convertible. But she is wise enough to realize that her crush on adolescent America is a flash in the pan. Langrick is an elfin charmer, and no film whose closing titles include the credit "Sisters to the Director" can be wholly without merit. Still, moviemakers have plowed the nostalgia field barren. Writer-Director Sandy Wilson adds nothing new except smug satire of those crass folk from the Lower 48.

Doris Dorrie knows a little more about men and moviemaking. In Men . . . , her hip updating of The Odd Couple, Julius (Heiner Lauterbach) is an ad exec who leaves his wife when he learns she is sleeping with a scruffy artist named Stefan (Uwe Ochsenknecht). Without revealing his identity, Julius moves in with Stefan and gets to know his enemy. Perhaps Julius has been too much the clockwork husband: sex in the morning, whatever his wife's disposition, and then jogging. Perhaps Stefan has been nothing but a bohemian diversion for his mistress: "I'm her clown. I'm the movie she goes to." She would have a good time at this movie. Men . . . makes its serious points, about the arts of loving and self-betrayal, without ever becoming solemn or didactic. Dorrie knows that men are never more foolish than when they take themselves seriously and their women frivolously. She knows too that even a film from Germany can burst with la vie and l'amour.