Here's Looking at You, Muchacha

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

HAVANA Directed by Sydney Pollack; Screenplay by Judith Rascoe and David Rayfiel

Offstage, the distant thunder of great events. In the background, an exotic city, sleepless, decadent and aswarm with corrupt and conniving characters. In the foreground, a displaced American male hides his latent idealism under a shady manner, and a displaced European woman hides her latent sexuality under the guise of loyalty to her husband and the outlawed political cause to which he has made a passionate and dangerous commitment.

They may call this movie Havana. But in our hearts we know it is Casablanca. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, for the first hour or so it is a very good thing. For director Sydney Pollack is a living oxymoron, a meticulous romantic. In reconstructing, very persuasively, the life of the Cuban capital as Fidel Castro's revolutionaries prepared to take it in the waning days of 1958, he also recaptures something of the doomy delirium of the film that obviously inspired him. And some of its smartness too: the dialogue -- especially that of its resident cynic, its Captain Renault (Alan Arkin playing a casino owner) -- is polished to a high sheen.

The Rick figure this time is Jack Weil (Robert Redford), a professional poker player aware that people tend to throw caution (and money) to the winds when their way of life is about to be radically altered. The Ilsa stand-in is Bobby Duran (Lena Olin), who lures Jack into doing a little light smuggling for her and then for the longest time resists being lured into an affair with him. Her reasons are sound: she is grief-stricken when led to believe that her husband (Raul Julia) has been murdered by the Batista regime, and she is in shock after enduring torture in a government jail. She does, however, repay Jack in the customary manner for arranging her escape.

It is at this point that Havana starts to go awry. It is not Redford's fault. The years have weathered him handsomely, and he contrives to lose his famous cool with insinuating subtlety. The problem lies with Olin, who never loses enough of her cool, and with Pollack and the writers. Whatever else is going on in their lives, Jack and Bobby need to come to a world-well-lost moment, a rocking, rolling acknowledgment of suppressed desires. That does not happen. We get shadows and tenderness instead. Then the script sends her up- country to join the rebels and sends Jake after her. Away from the heat and claustrophobia of Havana, the picture loses plausibility and energy.

Not, perhaps, fatally. For it rediscovers its best self, its high romantic spirit, in time for a well-judged ending -- renunciations and not completely quashed yearnings all nicely mixed up. At its least, Havana reminds us how infrequently movies today invoke the romantic spirit. At its height, it satisfies our longing to experience that spirit anew. Put it this way: we can stand more than one Casablanca every 48 years.