Adventures in Hopeless Love

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE NEST

Directed and Written by Jaime de Arminan

LE BEAU MARIAGE

Directed and Written by Eric Rohmer

One usually thinks of sexual obsession as an undetected virus of the soul, a bug caught some time in the formative years but remaining dormant until some temporary weakness of the mind or spirit permits it to break loose. Surely such a classic pathology lies behind the unexpected passion that afflicts the otherwise kindly and harmless Don Alejandro in a wise and compassionate Spanish film called The Nest. The strength of Eric Rohmer's equally excellent Le Beau Manage is that it shows how rationalism, which is supposed to immunize us against our more maddened desires, can, when indulged in to excess, also provide a breeding ground for love gone lunatic.

The Don, to take up the simpler but perhaps more moving case first, is a widower, standing on the cusp of old age, living on his late wife's money on a ranch somewhere in Bunuel country. He reads, plays chess against a computer, vigorously conducts the music he plays on his hifi. Sometimes he visits his mistress in Salamanca, more frequently he calls on his only friend, a priest, to chide him with anticlerical chat. He has become less worldly than the good father, and easy prey for Goyita, a 13-year-old schoolgirl (Ana Torrent of Cria), an instinctive siren who senses in him, despite their differences in age and sex, a kindred eccentricity of spirit. He is a very clean old man (especially as portrayed by the innocent-eyed Hector Alterio), and it is she who lures him on into an affair that is chaste sexually, utterly enthralling emotionally. The switch--it is the child who entraps, the adult who is victimized--is full of delicious irony. But it is with dark deftness that Writer-Director Arminan has Goyita increase her demands on Alejandro until she brings him to destruction, herself to an awareness of female power. One goes smiling to the film's tragically romantic close.

A similar dry, wry spirit, something of a trademark with Eric Rohmer (Claire's Knee, The Aviator's Wife), moves through Le Beau Manage. A brisk young woman named Sabine (Beatrice Romand) quite sensibly grows tired of transitory affairs (and the preoccupations married men bring to them) and calmly informs friends and family that she is about to marry, though she does not yet know whom. She is confident, however, based on past experience, that she can ensnare any man she wants. Her choice is a good-looking lawyer (Andre Dussollier), the right number of years older, the right amount richer than she. Trouble is, he politely refuses to fall in with her plan. The rest of the movie offers us the mildly sadistic pleasure of watching misplaced confidence crumble into obsessive scheming as Sabine tries to make her quarry see the error of not obliging her. The film has salutary things to say about the perils of self-absorption and about the need to consult other people before we try to make them live inside our dreams. Sometimes Rohmer's portrait of a woman who speaks her mind all too certainly becomes grating; it is always good to like the person you are laughing at. But her creator's intelligence is, as ever, bracing and pleasure enough to encounter in any circumstances.

--By Richard Schickel

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