Culture Gap

By Frank Rich

FRENCH POSTCARDS

Directed by Willard Huyck Screenplay by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz

In American Graffiti, Screenwriters Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz collaborated with Director George Lucas to transform high school graduation into a rite of mythic proportions. Lucas has moved on to more celestial myths, but his former partners remain preoccupied with the pangs of growing up. In French Postcards, Huyck and Katz try to create a true sequel to Graffiti: their new film is a rueful comedy about American students whose lives change dramatically during a year abroad. But this time the director is Huyck, not Lucas, and the results are deflating. French Postcards'comic anecdotes do not coalesce into a universal saga of postadolescence; they merely come across as a string of hit-and-miss jokes.

Some of the humor, especially early on, is quite funny. When the characters first arrive in Paris, they seem as gauche as those prototypical U.S. tourists in Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad. Joel (Miles Chapin), a preppie who has come to Europe to dress up his college transcript, stretches his rudimentary French vocabulary into epic malapropisms. Alex (David Marshall Grant), an Oberlin aesthete, takes to reading Hemingway aloud and composing songs with lyrics like "Paris is a teacher who has lessons to give/ How to love, how to live." The lovesick Laura (Blanche Baker) turns sightseeing into a grim obsession by setting out to visit every listing in the Michelin Guide. Of course these students, like so many before them, are not so adept at going native that they can successfully resist an occasional Big Mac attack.

Once the characters have been established, the screenwriters ease up. Alex falls in love with his married teacher--a closet Americophile amusingly played by Marie-France Pisier-- only to become the butt of silly sex gags. Laura veers into a nervous breakdown that gratuitously breaks the movie's antic mood. Joel's romance with a snippy French girl (Val erie Quennessen) is a hotbed of cliches; it moves us only because Chapin's likable innocence contrasts so well with Quennessen's robust, Moreau-like sexuality.

The direction generally accentuates the script's failings. Though Huyck cuts frantically among his stories, he tuckers out the audience without ever accelerating the film. The elaborate finale, involving a chaotic end-of-term school play, does not achieve its intended purpose of ty ing all the plot lines into a bittersweet cli max. What is missing is Lucas' fluent visual language. In cinematic terms, French Postcards sadly proves to be not so much American Graffiti as fractured Franglais. Rich

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