Landscape for Lovers

Love Is a Funny Thing is a kind of dual romance. It is simultaneously the story of an affair between a French film actress (Annie Girardot) and a composer (Jean-Paul Belmondo) and a testament to Director Claude Lelouch's passion for the U.S. The whole country becomes a vast film set through which Lelouch moves his actors with the abandon of an intoxicated tourist.

Thanks primarily to the considerable charm of the two leading players, the characters never get lost. Belmondo's boyish bravura and Annie Girardot's wily sexuality lend substance to a plot as insubstantial as California sunshine. The lovers first meet on the set of a Hollywood film in which she plays the lead. He has been commissioned to write a suitably romantic score "with a lot of fiddles." Prolonged transatlantic phone calls to their respective mates serve only to increase the passion of an affair begun as a kind of mutual convenience. Their first night together is amusing, satisfying, but also rather flippant. When the time approaches for him to leave, however, he proposes on a whim that they fly off to Las Vegas for a night. On a whim--and perhaps on the hope of something more--she accepts.

They spend a giggly evening at a floor show in Caesar's Palace, then, instead of parting in the morning, continue their journey through the Southwest. Their car is pursued by imaginary Indians on the warpath and they realize, finally, that their longing for each other is even deeper than their loneliness. By the time they reach New Orleans, she has confessed to her husband and forced her paramour to make a decision: they will end their marriages and rendezvous in Nice.

Extensive improvisation lends to many of Lelouch's scenes an admirable air of spontaneous good humor--as when the lovers pause in an Arizona roadside cafe and spend a few minutes identifying the portraits on their French currency to an incredulous waiter. This humor, in fact, is the film's saving grace.

In such previous exercises as A Man and a Woman, Lelouch's unrelievedly romantic style has overemphasized his mawkish plots. Here he seems at times to be kidding himself. The zestful air of holiday and discovery is irresistible. If Antonioni's Zabriskie Point was a poison-pen letter to America, then Love Is a Funny Thing is a distinctively Gallic billetdoux that turns the entire continent into a joyful landscape for lovers.

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