Le sourire

Claude Miller's epic erotic fantasy is an unclassifiably eccentric, beautiful cinematic dessert.

Long-in-the-tooth Jean-Pierre Marielle, a bored psychiatrist, falls hopelessly in love with with child-woman Emmanuelle Siegner( Odile) and leaves his comfortable environs (and wife) to go on the road -- and train -- with her.

Into this potentially explosive stew are woven a subplot about a carnival barker (Richard Bohringer), unfinished business with an ex-wife and ruminations on death and irresponsibility.

Miller's images are highly charged and gleefully erotic, and he uses a gorgeous signature tune, "Jump For Joy", to set and reset the tone. In one very hot sequence, the track is played as Miller cuts between Marielle riding an out-on-control bicycle and Seigner playing a game of tennis with herself. How the two threads meet is pure magic. And one will never forget the sweeping traveling shots that are so well shot and scored.

Nothing about the film is locked down, and that's what makes it so enjoyable. Like a new love affair, it is propelled by its own, exhuberant euphoria. It experiments, detours through some wonderful fantasy sequences and still manages to be highly involving and deeply moving.

The performances are all exemplary.