MOVIE REVIEW : ‘CAGE’ FALLS SHORT AS 3 TIMES A LADY

Occasionally, parties drag on far too long, and that’s mostly the case with “La Cage aux Folles 3.”

Once again, we’re back at La Cage, the renowned St. Tropez transvestite cabaret, run by suave impresario Renato (Ugo Tognazzi), and headlined by his longtime lover Albin (Michel Serrault). Once again, we’re privy to the pair’s offstage bickerings, and to Renato’s attempts to keep from riling his upright young son’s apoplectic father-in-law (Michel Galabru as a kind of French Jerry Falwell).

Once again, housemaid Benny Luke flits and smirks; once again, Albin--a moon-child of Harry Langdon dimensions--struggles to approximate “normality” while betraying himself with continuous falsetto squeaks and shrieks. Once again . . . but, by now, once again is once too much.

The problem lies with another (absent) pair: Edouardo Molinaro, who directed the first two “Cages,” and Francis Veber who co-wrote the first (with Jean Poiret). The first “Cage” was no accident. Molinaro was a comedy expert; Poiret and Serrault had been friends and collaborators for years (dating back to Sacha Guitry’s 1957 “Lovers and Thieves”), and Veber is France’s champion writer of male-bonding comedies.

It wasn’t a work of genius (except for the performances of Serrault and Tognazzi), but it was an immaculately constructed farce: a tongue-in-cheek variation of “Charley’s Aunt” that made the obvious moves with sly urbanity and skill. It gave the audience what it wanted: a fairy-tale portrait of homosexual life in an epicene paradise of pink pillows and gaudy frou-frou. Watching Serrault’s deadpan travesty of drag-queen gestures, you glimpsed, eerily, the gay mannerisms employed by many of the great comedians: Chaplin’s mincing gait, Laurel and Hardy’s spats, Jack Benny’s arch “Well!”

Serrault and Tognazzi’s brilliance made the first film a surprise hit, but it also had a solid base. Now the leads are still around--and excellent--but the ground has gone mushy. The whole movie is too languid, too amiable. It’s lost any kind of comic edge.

Molinaro’s replacement, Georges Lautner, is known for bland spy spoofs and comic thrillers. His new premise is mild: a ducal inheritance that Albin can only inherit if he marries and procreates a son within 18 months. (This never seems as impossible as Lautner would have us believe: Hasn’t he heard of artificial insemination?)

Lautner and his collaborators are as obvious as Molinaro and his, but they have only a fraction of the skill. The movie is like a long, drowsy afternoon in a cocktail lounge. It’s overly sweet and it makes you sluggish to watch it: like a party where the champagne has gone flat in plastic cups and the Trivial Pursuits are beginning to pall.

‘LA CAGE AUX FOLLES 3’ A Tri-Star release. Executive producer Marcello Danon. Director Georges Lautner. Script Michel Audiard, Jacques Audiard, Gerard Lamballe, Danon, Lautner. Music Ennio Morricone. Camera Luciano Tovoli. With Michel Serrault, Ugo Tognazzi, Stephane Audran, Michel Galabru.

MPAA rating: PG-13 (parents are strongly cautioned; some material may be inappropriate for children under 13).