Easy Come, Easy Go

THIS IS the first film I've ever known that provides its viewers with a money-back guarantee, borrowing a page from those late night television spielmeisters who peddle veg-a-matics. Borrowed, too, is a professional slickness and elan by which Cesar and Rosalie comes closer than it should to selling itself to the audience.

The non-plot proves a convenient vehicle for an assault on the impressionable eye and idle imagination. Cesar (Yves Montand) is a self-made tycoon, a blustery tough guy with a big heart full of histrionic whimsy, whose larger than life personality subsumes John Wayne and Buster Keaton under a single brow. Romy Schneider, rescued from the anonymity of a screen beauty turned tiresome, plays Cesar's lover Rosalie. She spends a good deal of her time casting long, soft, knowing looks at everyone, liberally displaying her carefully assembled sumptuousness.

The catalyst of the action, however, is David (Sami Frei), an artist who returns to Paris to pick up with Rosalie where he left off several years ago. David is a reserved and preoccupied figure, languidly handsome, and given to the terse, apocalyptic remarks with which soap opera segments end in mystery. The one-upmanship of the two suitors in their fight for Rosalie is the organizing theme of the early scenes. The camera reveals Cesar and David through her eyes, as she makes mental comparisons, and the tension is akin to that which accompanies long-winded introductions at championship fights. In this corner, the brusque and straightforward color of Upward Mobility. In the other, the precious and enigmatic allure of Aesthetic Sensibility.

The fight, however, never comes off. In fact, long before Rosalie leaves both of them, Cesar and David have become best friends. This is one of the consequences of living, as all the characters do, in an airbrushed world, in which everyone and everything is stylized and charming. No stray marks, no smudges, no coloring outside the lines in this crayon book. Every man seems to keep a beautiful mistress of firm breasts and docile character. David's down and out artist friends have that fashionably seedy look which has replaced plaids on the Fly Club veranda. One can hardly blame characters for their easy attraction to each other in a universe of this sort.

APPETITES are large and effortlessly satisfied here; personalities are protected from tension and splintering. It's as easy as "Let's live together." For that reason the personalities in Cesar and Rosalie interact no more profoundly than billiard balls. The dramatic moments simply lack credibility. Cesar, for example, is subject to violent fits of temper occasioned by Rosalie's desertion--but the tone of the movie informs us that these are nothing but outbursts of sound and fury, moving toward no tragic destination, only emphasizing Cesar's buffoonish character. Since such incidents neither shift the equilibrium of forces nor portend such a shift, they soon appear unnecessary, and melodramatic in comparison with the whole. The film is so slick that every attempt at seriousness slides right off.

Montand's performance, though outstanding in its breadth of characterization, further attenuates the substance of the film, for Cesar quickly develops into a doubly self-conscious showman, playing to the camera as well as the cast, with rolls of the eye and slapstick grimaces coming to dominate his personality. And the chemistry between these characters is such that when one shows off the others follow suit. Montand ultimately becomes hemmed in by his own loveable ostentation; his suicide attempt, conducted in all, seriousness, brought forth chuckles from an audience doggedly looking for a punchline.

THIS FILM bases its claim to our attention on pure and unabashed charisma. It works its magic so long as we are willing to suspend disbelief. But charisma, on the screen and off, must eventually perform in order to justify its hold; otherwise, it is a sham and an affront. Cesar and Rosalie doesn't perform; it really doesn't even attempt to.