Word: lafont
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...been planning to come here some day," said Harry Lafont, 47, a French businessman on holiday in the U.S. this month with his wife Suzy. "When the dollar was devalued once again, we decided we could make the trip this year." Like the Lafonts, vacationers from around the world are taking advantage of dollar devaluations, cheap charter flights and their own higher incomes by joining the biggest tour ist invasion the U.S. has ever experienced. Led by the Japanese, British, West Germans and French in that or der, overseas travel to America in the first three months...
...first-timers, the Lafonts stuck pretty much to prime attractions. They had signed up three months in advance for an economy charter flight to the U.S. They set out, with a budget of $2,000 for fares, meals and hotels, on a whirlwind coast-to-coast tour of the U.S. During their 48-hour stay in Los Angeles, they sampled bumper-to-bumper freeway traffic, paid a visit to Disneyland, took a bus tour of Beverly Hills and a trip to the sprawling baroque mansion of Silent Film Star Harold Lloyd. Though pleased by the friendliness of Americans wherever they...
...with many foreign visitors, they encountered serious communication problems. "In Europe, a U.S. tourist can always find someone who speaks English at the hotel or at the airport," said Lafont, who is limited to schoolboy English himself. "Here, nobody speaks French. We got along as best we could. In New York we couldn't understand anybody. They must speak some special slang...
Truffaut displays his distinctive and exuberant virtuosity; the film is briskly and surely made. The actors are fine, especially Denner, as a notably intense exterminator, and Guy Marchand, as a sleazy vocalist called Sam Golden who sports an extensive wardrobe of Damon Runyon gangster duds. But Bernadette Lafont can never find quite the proper combination of artfulness and amorality as Camille. She has an easy, unforced, energetic sexuality, but her ruthlessness does not seem to suit her. She tries too hard to act it, perhaps because it was never fully there in the script, which is concerned more with gymnastics...
...structural familiarity spreads itself into the story. Camille Bliss (Bernadette Lafont), thoroughly resistable convict, is the subject of a sociology thesis on "Criminal Women." Camille has nothing going for her at all -- ingnorant, vulgar, even hook-nosed--and yet Stanislas (Andre Dussollier) chooses her as subject over, we are told, an axe murderer and a homicidal Pole, for no discernable reason. No matter. From the outset, her insidious charm is clear. And that's half the story -- her complete captivation of Stanislas, the dryest of men, competent and professional but obviously ill-at-ease, even rapped, when placed...