Postdated

By RICHARD CORLISS

I SENT A LETTER TO MY LOVE Directed by Moshe Mizrahi Screenplay by Gerard Brack and Moshe Mizrahi

They stand in single file at the post-office window, their hair gray, the lines of their plain, neat dresses amplified by age and experience, their thoughts mixing hope and anxiety. It is midafternoon, and dusk is settling on their lives, but as they move up in line they permit themselves to wonder: Is there a letter for me today? The efficient, sympathetic mademoiselle behind the counter nods yes, and watches aging eyes light up--or says, "Helas, non, madame," and averts her glance from a spinsterly face gone slack. When you send a letter to your love --even if he is a "Dear Stranger" who caresses you through the mail--an "Helas, non, madame "can break your heart.

Louise (Simone Signoret) is one of those women. She and her crippled brother Gilles (Jean Rochefort) seem resigned to live out their days exchanging good-natured insults. Louise keeps house and her own counsel; the defiantly cheerful Gilles looks at life from a wheelchair, through a telescope lens. But there is untapped love in them both, and a desperate resolve. Louise places a personal notice in the local paper, asking to meet a "refined gentleman." To her shock and chagrin, the one respondent is Gilles. "My legs are paralyzed," he declares in his first letter, "but my heart is free and I know how to love." And so Louise determines to create another life, a love life, for her brother: she writes to him, as "Beatrice Deschamps," and Gilles becomes her maimed, ardent Vergil. The question is whether she will lead him to paradise or purgatory.

While Hollywood movies send up skyrockets of comedy and terror, the French cinema smolders like an untended hearth fire. No more the giddiness of the New Wave, whose anarchic high spirits fragmented film language and frag-bombed bourgeois complacency. Twenty years later, the bourgeoisie is again dominant, but now more thoughtful, less ready to judge. Like a concerned family doctor, today's

French movies speak in whispers and prescribe moderation; they take stethoscope readings of the middle-class heart and find passion and accommodation, romance and regret, residing there. Though Bernice Rubens' novel and play I Sent a Letter to My Love are set in Wales, they have found a home on the coast of Brittany and with this small, splendid cast.

Jean Rochefort has heretofore put his sheepish grin and Slinky-like gait into the service of boulevard comedy. Here he is both more powerful and more discreet, signaling the film's shifting moods with each new spasm of Gilles's anticipation and anguish. Delphine Seyrig, who plays his neighbor, the lovely, slow-witted Yvette, was once the very model of Marienbad chic. It is a pleasure to see those enigmatic eyes widen in what Yvette means to convey as delight, to see her smile squirm at Gilles's gentle ribaldry.

But the show belongs to Simone Signoret. After 40 years in movies, Signoret has the sturdy, pouched, life-lined charm of an old duffel bag. She is a marvelous behavioral actress. Smiles and tears are easy enough, but no one is better than Signoret at sitting still, daring life to try and impress her. Luckily for her, in France actors are not asked to stay svelte and sexy into senility. The family doctor looked at Signoret and encouraged her to put on weight, go gray, show her age, be herself--and still be a star. At 61, she has earned her Letter. --By Richard Corliss

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