Love's Faces

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

JOSEPHA

Directed and Written by Christopher Frank

The apartment is too small. The dog is too large. Michel has just been caught having an affair with a pressagent. And the best job Josepha can get for the moment is in a soft-core porn movie. Well, that's show business, and it is hard to remember a movie that has better caught the flavor of life down at the supporting-player level (where you do your best work in little theaters for audiences of a hundred and your worst work on television for audiences of millions) than Christopher Frank's wise, rueful, often comical little import from France.

Hard, also, to remember a movie that has more authentically captured the fretfulness of a relationship where nothing is irredeemably wrong but nothing is terribly right. When, on location for her foolish film, Josepha decides to have a vengeful affair, her aim is to shake up, not necessarily break up, her marriage. But it turns out that the drift into separation is neither more nor less uncomfortable to endure than the tuggings and haulings of an old marriage. It does, at least, give everyone a new set of problems to think about, and the novelty is welcome. Josepha lacks the melodrama of many of the recent films about divorce, but that adds to its truthfulness. It is also well played by all three members of its likable triangle (Miou-Miou, Claude Brasseur, Bruno Cremer), and it is full of small, smart observations about men, women, life and the theatrical calling. Best of all is the film's lack of finality, the sense it imparts that when it leaves the trio, their lives are still unresolved, still resistant to neat summary. One hopes that the modesty with which it offers up its intelligence does not prevent it from getting the attention it richly merits. --By Richard Schickel

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