Kiss the Money and Run

HAPPY NEW YEAR (directed by Claude Lelouch, starring Francoise Fabian, Charles Gerard and Lino Ventura) is so much gauzy enchantment that it takes some extra deep breathers to come down once you've hit the street. The movie could fill the prescription of the most diehard dream factory devotee--romance and a robbery heist, suspense and soft-boiled humor, a 'sensitive' style that cloaks everything in a nimbus of mist. It's the very best kind of make-out movie, all promises. And if you're not up for a few hours of huggy-wug and kissy-bear--though it would be a shame not to play since the movie is jived to slush up the heartbeats--the movie has got messages with a vengeance. And that is, really, its only problem.

Lelouch takes care to place his tale in the late sixties, though there is nothing insistently late sixties in the movie. It's more one of those timeless love stories than anything else: a middle aged professional crook holing up in Cannes to rob a fancy (Van Cleef's) jewelry store, is smitten by the antique dealer who runs the shop adjacent. He pursues her by as labyrinthine a design as the one he lays for the robbery. He's no wizard at mind-reading, however, and both plans backfire. The police nab him (for some mysterious reason he dawdles at the scene of the crime--goofy, considering all of his other precautions), and while he does win his way into Francoise's bed, it seems to happen more through a combination of accident and his own foolhardiness than his calculation. Then somehow their barely jelled love affair survives five years of prison for him and five of other affairs for her, and the picture fades out on a soulful shot of their reunion.

THIS has every intention of being a with-it movie. Francoise is the femme libre--twice married and twice divorced, unfettered and irreligious, a businesswoman with wile and culture. She lives alone and sleeps around to keep herself sexually vital; she talks tough, sizing her men like a butcher does his meat. And she wonders what it is to be a woman. Then this so modern woman involves herself in a romance made of nineteenth-century novels's stuff. She's got 'seventies style, but it must be all facejob. The woman inside launches way, unfashionably back.

The affair would never happen were she otherwise. For Simon with his connoisseur's bachelor pride and his crook's cool, is sexually antique. He goes after her like a bullfighter (or the bull) with every gimmick going in the old sexual catch business. He feeds her the lines he figures she wants to hear: "I wouldn't insult a woman by proposing," and the sticker, "A woman is a man who cries." (What instincts.) Which is what--the brute man that he is through and through--she finally succumbs to. He gets his first handle on her heart when he outwits her in a deal over a Louis XVI table, and he clinches the matter when he stands up to the taunts of her intellectual friends. Out of ignorance he keeps mum at a Christmas soiree while three of these pink-faced friends debate Marx and the Church--they talk hollow-voiced in five syllable jargon and make their points with snaky fingertip gestures. When Simon interrupts to protest their irreverence, they quiz him on his culture, until, failed and furious, he takes a stolid leave.

And there you have it, or so Lelouch would have it, society has been effeminized. The intellectuals are dainty dried up men whose sterile concepts mark a lack of virility. And the bourgeoisie--like the manager of Van Cleef's who gets twitchy and makes clucking noises like a mother hen before rich customers--are a lost cause.

Society, for Lelouch, has gone either abstract and artificial or money-mongering. The straight world has been sissified for sex. To save your sex, then, you have got to leave society--just as Simon, criminal, has staked out the last male frontier, the rough, untamed places where men can be men. Witness his Western hero style, the steady shoulders and gruff speech, the way he follows his fate, the loner doing what must be done. He's like the old maid's dream boyfriend, daredevil to the world, all sweetness to her. No weaknesses, no fetishes, no perversities. You can't get much closer to Doris Dayland. This one's as straight as they come.

No matter that he's a thief; for society, as Lelouch sees it, is but a grand game of cops and robbers anyway. Simon merely plays the game with society rather than within it. When Francoise asks him how he came by such a profession, he shrugs, "I come by mine the same way you do by yours, out of need or by choice." He is obviously the moral man. He is also the glamorous gangster. Given the style in which he executes the heist--posing as a rich ice cream manufacturer, vacationing in a Ritzy Cannes hotel, driving a Mercedes, bowling over women the while--it's a wonder that anybody ever goes straight. The answer is that they're gutless (feminized). It takes a Simon, a Courageous man, to abandon a safe life of bourgeois go-getting for a dangerous life of challenging it. It's outlawry as freedom.

Lelouch spends a good deal of this movie making fun of his first success, A Man and a Woman--he has a roomful of convicts hurling hisses at it on New Year's Eve. Now you've got to credit him for not taking that first financial and prestigious success as artistic encouragement. And Happy New Year is a better movie--which isn't saying much--but not too different. It's as if he tried here to penetrate to the man and woman the first movie sloshed over with sentiment. And he ended up with just as pretty a movie: He tints for mood, blurs for romance, switches to black and white for solemnity. The actors don't have to do anything because the soulful camera projects all their moods on them. It's rhythmed and designed more like a bumpy hayride than a movie.

Don't, though, let anything that's been said so far keep you from seeing the movie. Hollywood, after all, never gave you more at the movies. And compared to A Man and a Woman, Happy New Year is a masterwork. It's also hogwash. So go lose yourself in it, just don't take it for real. Because it's only another kiss kiss bang bang movie.