Wry Sigh

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE AVIATOR'S WIFE

Directed and Written by Eric Rohmer

The business of this intricately designed yet simply stated movie is to turn obsession into irony. This is always a useful enterprise. In life, it is the great antidote to insomnia; in movies, it is the alternative to melodrama and an excess of gunshots in the final reel.

In his heart Franc,ois (Philippe Marlaud), the protagonist of Eric Rohmer's intelligently talkative movie, is every bit as bonkers over his lady as William Hurt is over Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. And Anne (Marie Riviere) is very possibly a greater pain to be with. Too self-absorbed even to fake passion, she does not seem to take even mildly sadistic pleasure in making Franc,ois, among others, dance to her off-key tunes. It may be that she unconsciously seeks revenge because she has been jilted by her married lover, the aviator of the title, but that is not a connection she consciously makes.

Franc,ois, however, makes all sorts of connections, most of them erroneous. When he spots the aviator leaving her apartment early one morning, he mistakenly assumes that it is after a night of revels and decides to follow him. Sure enough, his quarry picks up another woman, and Franc,ois, hoping to prove to Anne that the flyer is two-timing her, becomes profoundly interested in his new role as amateur detective. Eventually he is proved wrong again, but luckily for him, his odd behavior attracts the interest of Lucie, an adolescent schoolgirl (Anne-Laure Meury), who is chipper, commonsensical and utterly charming--the larky heart of the film. For her, his obsession is a game, something to engage her imagination more sportively than the German grammar she's supposed to be studying that afternoon in the park.

Her behavior, at once coltish and wise, is an implicit commentary on his lugubrious single-mindedness. Lucie is a creature, as Rohmer sees her, of impulse and open air, while Anne is seen mostly in her cramped apartment, which can be seen as the logical extension of her cramped spirit. This, alas, is something Franc,ois does not notice. The most the movie concedes him is the possibility that by sorting through his many wrong assumptions about the essentially innocent man he was following, he may have taken a small step toward extricating himself from his deluding passion. But like everything else in this sidelong glance of a movie, that point is, at most, implied. He has a long road to travel before he finds the freedom to respond to life as Rohmer does--with a wry sigh. The director of such wittily profound films as My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee and The Marquise of O . . ., Rohmer has long since established himself as one of film's most assured miniaturists. This latest meditation on romantic absurdity is one of his most approachable and overtly comic works. --By Richard Schickel

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