Imported Variety

By JAY COCKS

Late summer is slack time, and theaters have to scrounge for new movies. That may be part of it. But a quick survey of three recent films from abroad also suggests that the revolutions in the European cinema of the early '60s have subsided, the changes they brought have become standardized, and film makers on the Continent have forsaken enterprise for convention.

COUSIN, COUSINE, much honored in France, is one of those overbearingly blithe sexual comedies that stirred the New Wave directors to rebellion. The movie confuses fecklessness with charm, trips so lightly that it never settles down to anything telling. Gallic comedies like Cousin, Cousine are animated by a certain earthbound volatility of spirit and depend on a willingness to believe that sensuality can come in an array of sizes and shades, all pastel.

Two cousins by marriage, Marthe (attractively played by Marie-Christine Barrault) and Ludovic (Victor Lanoux), strike up a love affair that is, at first, resolutely platonic. The family thinks the couple is carrying on: fine, let them think whatever they want. After a while, however, Marthe and Ludovic agree that they are bearing the burden of suspicion without reaping any of the benefits. So they have at it with the sort of manufactured high spirits that could be bottled and labeled "Whimsical Abandon." They check into a hotel for a quick afternoon rendezvous, lose track of time and spend the rest of the day together, making love and painting silly designs over each other's bodies. They practically clobber each other with cuteness.

Meanwhile, the family is in some distress: Ludovic's wife threatens suicide; Marthe's husband, jealous, even desists from his own love affairs to bring her to heel. Although Director Jean-Charles Tacchella manages some telling glimpses of family life, Cousin, Cousine becomes a sort of bourgeois anti-bourgeois parody. At its worst moments the movie looks like a musical without songs. Characters glide about, acting as if they are about to burst into song.

Another French movie, THE CLOCKMAKER, is more sober but similarly slight. Philippe Noiret, a worthy actor with the wistful, befuddled expression of an alpine rescue dog, appears as a widowed father whose son has collaborated in the killing of a factory foreman. The son is on the run with his partner in crime, who is also his girl friend. These two are not even glimpsed until late in the film, where they reveal themselves to be casual about the killing, past the point of indifference. Pop is not a figure of considerable passion either, and The Clockmaker concerns the tentative, ironic reconciliation between father and son, who are finally united by their moral blankness. It is a parched, parochial movie.

Noiret also shows up in MY FRIENDS, a film begun by the witty, raucous Pietro Germi (Divorce--Italian Style), who collaborated on the script but died after hardly a week of filming in 1974, at the age of 60. Mario Monicelli (Big Deal on Madonna Street) completed the movie, which, unfortunately, does little credit to anyone. My Friends concerns the infrequently amusing forays of a group of five stalwarts (Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi, Gastone Moshin, Duilio Del Prete, Adolfo Celi) who break out of their conventional, half-failing lives to have a little fun. This usually involves playing practical jokes--such as slapping in sequence the faces of passengers leaning out the windows of a departing train--and acting in general like sailors on their first shore leave. The audience is meant to feel compassion for these arrested adolescents, but also to laugh at their pranks--that is, to be critics and accomplices at once. If such a feat were possible, these fellows do not justify making the effort.

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