Sheer Gaul

Male Companion. Movies about sex, like sex itself, thrive best on the illusion that an air of joyous improvisation covers a multitude of sins. In Companion, Director Philippe de Broca (The Five-Day Lover, The Love Game) again sets light-footed Jean-Pierre Cassel to dancing from escapade to escapade as inoffensively as a hummingbird buzzing the phlox.

Cassel impishly initiates a seduction while posing nude for a life class in Rome. He has his way with a working model (Irina Demick), a baker's wife (Sandra Milo), a widow (Annie Girardot) and a winsome ingenue (Catherine Deneuve)--without ever letting a hint of prurience mar his bland fac,ade. Quite simply, he appears to have been overtaken by the sex drive before learning how to steer. According to the plot, Cassel has other things on his mind, for he plays a professional scapegrace taught by his knavish old granddad "to be an idle man." His successful misadventures are ultimately summed up in a bestseller entitled Doing Nothing, which consists of 200 blank pages.

The trouble is, Male Companion's script might well have been adapted from the same book. Indolence as a theme leads easily to a certain aimlessness of execution, just as nothingness leads to naught. Director De Broca's spontaneity and Cassel's utter abandon with a throng of acquiescent beauties meet every challenge except the vital one of squeezing triumph out of a trifle.

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