French Lesson

By R.S.

HEART TO HEART Directed by Pascal Thomas Screenplay by Jacques Lourcelles and Pascal Thomas

The Roussels have a family tradition: none of their daughters ever contemplates marriage without first becoming pregnant. This does not seem to be a conscious decision, but just the way things work out. This monkey-see, monkey-do tendency renders the father wry and the mother weary. As for the young women, the eldest ends up comfortably settled, the second unhappy to the point of a mental breakdown, while the youngest, after losing her child, decides not to marry.

This may sound like soap opera, but it is not, for Director Thomas has a way of letting his melodramatic moments flow smoothly into the stream of life. Sexual misadventures are part of that flow, but so is the family dog's being discovered by the movies (Thomas casts him as the pooch romping on the beach at the end of A Man and a Woman), an uncle whose credentials for believing he is an expert on women consist mostly of the fact that his wife deserted him, a grandfather who has the wisdom to tell one of the girls it is impossible to know whom one has really loved until life is nearly over.

Heart to Heart respects the charm of the quotidian, finds in its little dramas wisdom and absurdity, sadness and folly--and, above all, liveliness. This cheering, but unsappy outlook is much in evidence as the younger generation of French directors, like Diane Kurys and Jean Charles Tacchella, crawls out from under Francois Truffaut's overcoat. It seems to be an almost exclusively Gallic view, making one want to send the entire American motion picture industry to sum mer school in France.

-R.S.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.