Kissing Cousins

FAMILY GATHERINGS do contain comic possibilities. A humorous, built-in tension exists between the piety of the events (religious holidays, weddings) that usually occasion them and the back-biting, excessive drinking or seductions that may ensue. Not only is an alcoholic uncle guaranteed, but there's always the presence of a host of eminently shockable types such as grandparents or mothers of the bride as well--what's the use of being outrageous if no one is scandalized? Add a passel of children to act as the fascinated witnesses of parental duplicity and you have most of the ingredients needed for a domestic farce.

You also have the running joke of Cousin, Cousine, Jean-Charles Tacchella's new romantic comedy. Throughout the movie, various inter-family assemblages, from funerals to Christmas eve parties, act as catalysts for, among other things, adultery, sex education, fist-fights, and, most important, the affair between two cousins that makes up the film's romantic content. The tone is consistently ebullient, the acting good and a few of the scenes are hilarious. But I think the critical raves this movie has garnered are all out of proportion to the small, if genuine, pleasures actually to be found.

Despite the buoyancy Tacchella successfully distills from the group scenes, Cousin, Cousine doesn't live up to its billing as a winsome masterpiece, largely because the amorous cousins, played by Marie Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux, are au fond too shallow. While no one would demand a trenchant political or psychological comment from romantic comedy, we do expect two distinct and compelling personalities whose collision will charm or amuse us. Maybe I'm prejudiced by American films (especially the screwball variety), but I want more quirkiness and spunk from the leads. Although Barrault and Lanoux are frequently endearing and fun to look at as a collection of handsome faces and gestures, there is no electricity in their dialogue. The decent, wholesome characters they play here will never insinuate themselves into your fantasies. Stripped of their comical situation, the pair would barely hold our interest.

THE COUPLE meets at a wedding reception, abandoned by their respective spouses, Marie-France Pisier and Guy Marchand, who are off making love. This latest infidelity is only one more in a long line of similar abuses both Barrault and Lanoux have suffered over the course of their decade-long marriages. Pisier is an impulsive and flirtatious gamine and Marchand a priapic cad who insists on relieving his guilt by telling his wife all the lurid details. If that isn't enough to stack the deck in favor of Barrault and Lanoux, we also find out that they, unlike their incorrigibly promiscuous mates, have for the most part remained stolidly faithful. They are such innocents, in fact, that even after their relationship moves from mutual solicitude to romantic attraction, they make an attempt to remain only platonic lovers. motorcycle. However, their underdog status

It is not until the point where even Cotton Mather would be urging them on that Barrault and Lanoux bed down. We are then treated to the much touted "healthy sensuality." I confess to being moved by much of this. There is a child-like and playful tenor to the sexuality here that is refreshing and just as real as the pathologies so often paraded before us. Rarely has lovemaking on the screen been so suffused with intimacy. Yet there wasn't one moment anyone could really call erotic. Lanoux and Barrault seemed at times almost de sexed, one with his roly-poly body and baby face, the other with her virginal paleness and girlish smile.

IF THIS IS an "accurate representation of happy, healthy sexuality" (as John Simon would have it), then it looks like happy, healthy sex could get pretty boring. Perhaps Tacchella never intended his hero and heroine to be sexy, but the safe and cozy personae he has provided keep us from finding them really intriguing--the lewd, dangerous or unpredictable traits all belong to Pisier and Marchand. If Tacchella really wanted to present complicated and poignant personalities he wouldn't have polarized emotions as he has. We do root for Barrault and Lanoux as their affair escalates, as they begin to take a mischievous delight in flaunting their romance in front of a chagrined Pisier and Marchand, and as they perform their final act of liberation--shattering one of the family functions by announcing their departure and running away on Lanoux's is too contrived for the film's resolution to touch us in more than a superficial way.

I am lured into raising these issues, seemingly irrelevant to a light romantic comedy, because Cousin, Cousine contains enough dramatic power and directorial sophistication to go, if only occasionally, beyond the limits of the genre. At times Tacchella's characters beg to be taken seriously, but in the end he always seems to be more comfortable with group scenes and visual humor. No one in Cousin, Cousine is witty--Tacchella wouldn't allow a character that freedom. He prefers to draw back and let us laugh at people and situations--a man with his pants down at a formal dinner, a woman about to slit her wrists who stops to fix her makeup instead, or a drunk at a wedding who obliges propriety by carefully filling his wine glass and then takes a swig out of the bottle anyway. As funny as Tacchella makes some of these scenes, we wind up yearning for some of these scenes, we wind up yearning for some individuals with self-awareness and panache.

Cousin, Cousine's final image epitomizes Tacchella's approach. Abandoned by the magician and his audience, a woman who is supposed to have been sawn in half cries out to be released from half a trunk. If Tacchella wants us to be truly involved with his films, he will have to let his people out of his box.