Word: lelouch
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
Screenplay by CLAUDE LELOUCH...
Although Claude Lelouch has made more than a dozen movies, he is probably still best known for A Man and a Woman (1966), a nighty piece of soft-focus romance that had a marked influence on the makers of television commercials. This new Lelouch film is also a wistful, rather melancholy love story, but it is more hard-edged and realistic, better by several furlongs than A Man and a Woman-to which indeed it appears to be a kind of reply...
...Lelouch forsakes the giddy sentimentality of A Man and a Woman for a relationship that is full of pride, injury and human compromise. Ventura and the ravishing Mme. Fabian bring dignity and depth to their roles, and Lelouch allows them the time and the latitude to develop their characterizations. The movie ends, memorably, on a close-up of Simon's face as he struggles to understand that Frangoise's insistence on her own needs and identity while he was in prison does not preclude a real and en during love for him. Lelouch never fur nishes more than...