Romance of the Century

AND NOW MY LOVE

Directed by CLAUDE LELOUCH Screenplay by CLAUDE LELOUCH and PETER UYTTERHOEVEN

It is asking a good deal of a film to expect it not only to depict history but enhance it. At the start of his new movie, Claude Lelouch seems about to make just such an attempt. And Now My Love begins like a silent movie. In the early years of the century, a Parisian cameraman (Charles Denner) is trying out his marvelous new movie machine in a park. He focuses on a lovely woman (Marthe Keller). In the series of fast cuts that follows, he marries her, she becomes pregnant, and he gets news of the birth of his daughter moments before he is killed during the first World War.

Twenty-five years later the daughter, now grown up, meets a boy, both played again by Keller and Denner. The meeting itself is extraordinary, a moment of strangeness and promise. It occurs on board a train loaded with passengers who are the devastated victims of concentration camps. The familiarity of the scene, the desolation of the faces, is awful. Yet Lelouch challenges our usual response by having a radio play Glenn Miller's Moonlight Serenade in the background. The song throws the scene into starker relief. The passengers are revealed not as victims but as survivors being ushered into the postwar world.

Unfortunately, all this is kind of an elaborate teaser, a prologue that explores the ancestry of the woman who will ultimately be the heroine of the film. Despite Lelouch's insubstantial reputation, based on the success of A Man and a Woman (1966), he has in fact made at least two witty, true love stories (Love Is a Funny Thing and Happy New Year). In And Now My Love. Lelouch starts to equal them, then turns away and instead reconfirms everyone's darkest thoughts about his unregenerate slickness.

The offspring of the couple on the train is a young woman (Keller, naturally) of great means and unhappy passions. The man she eventually meets (Andre Dussollier) is a commercial director turned feature film maker who possesses the sort of airy style one inevitably associates with Lelouch himself. And Now My Love mostly has to do with bringing these two prospective paramours together. Lelouch relentlessly follows their separate stories until he sits his lovers down next to each other on a flight from Paris to New York. We have it from the director himself that a grand passion is born right there in first class. Lelouch illustrates this new state of affairs by showing the lovers' separate suitcases cozying up to each other on the baggage ramp.

American Title. Such gushy infelicities are far more common in And Now My Love than the hard enterprise of the train sequence. The movie looks, overall, like one of the hero's commercials.

There is an appearance by the singer-composer Gilbert Becaud, whose most famous composition gave this film its American title. His presence seems a wholly unnecessary novelty, and his songs are performed on the sound track with no-nonsense billing in the subtitles. "Sung by Gilbert Becaud" flashes on the screen every time a scrap of mel ody is played. It is not the sort of thing to brag about.

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