rhoda-9

Adolph Green has, to put it mildly, never been much of an actor (remember when My Favorite Year stopped dead whenever he appeared?), but in this he doesn't act at all. He just yells and complains about everything in which Paris differs from Cleveland, as if saying that he doesn't like something and it's crazy is automatically hilarious.

Gerard Depardieu does act--as if he doesn't want to acknowledge he is in the movie and hopes no one else will notice. The woman who plays Green's daughter is as incompetent with her accent as with her acting--after living in Paris for two years, she sounds like an American child sounding out French for the first time. But, oh, doesn't she think she's cute.

One feels sorry for Linda Lavin, who is always nice, and who remains nice even amidst all this rubbish.

If Orry-Kelly was such a great designer (and he was), why did the director of this silly movie not show him some respect? Instead she uses his life as a washing line on which to hang a row of coy, childish conceits. We are told that Orry-Kelly was someone who would take a secret to the grave. Not a statement that needs explanation, is it? But it is illustrated by putting him in a coffin, with lipstick-red tape over his mouth, that is carried by several stone-faced models in evening dress. It's as if a child were given the task of making a picture out of a sentence.

Other nonsense includes a very unprepossessing young man playing the part of the designer, and spending a lot of his time rowing a boat--not, I think, the way Orry-Kelly left his native Australia. The director also seems more excited by the fact that Orry-Kelly was gay than by his superb designing skills, spending a lot of time with such unsavoury people as Scott Bowers, the author of a disgusting book about famous people he supposedly performed with (not in the films).

The whole thing is an exercise in self-indulgence, with feeble wackiness masquerading as creativity.

Well, okay, there's no singing and dancing, but look at what it does have: the Riviera, fast cars, luxury hotels, prizefighting, a gigolo-thief, symbolism, irony, rape, and nuns. Therese, the would-be nun, is snatched from the convent at nearly the last minute and returned to a world which, warmly bourgeois on the surface, is in fact teeming with villainy and obsession. When the criminal's obsession with money collides with Therese's obsession with divine justice, the screen practically combusts. (There is, as well, a scene in which fire is used to represent the mortal dangers of both carelessness and passion.)

Juliette Greco, young and gorgeous, has cheekbones that just don't stop. She vividly personifies the forces of God and nature that leave terrible destruction in their wake. A terrific powerhouse of a movie.