‘A MAN AND A WOMAN’ REDUX: TRYING TO REKINDLE THE ASHES

Soft piano music flooded through the foyer of the five-star Hotel Normandy, mood music redolent of liaisons past and probably to come, wafting along the corridors like fragrant scent. Even the wallpaper was the color of faded romance.

In the dining room, Claude Lelouch listened to the sounds filtering through from outside, watched the rain slicing across the big picture windows.

He smiled. The harder it rained, the better he liked it. “ Formidable! “ he said, squinting through the slender lightweight 35-millimeter camera strapped around him like a parachute harness. “ For-mi-dable! “

He’d ordered Michel the bar pianist to keep playing day and night if necessary, whenever Anouk Aimee, Jean-Louis Trintignant and his cast and crew were around. And always to include that certain theme from Francis Lai: Sha-da-da-dadada-da-dadadada-da. . . .

They’ve come together, the director, the stars, the rainy mood, to make “A Man and a Woman--20 Years Later,” just two decades almost to the day since that first marvelously evocative, hugely successful and, some said, crassly overromantic “Un Homme et Une Femme” elevated Lelouch to the pedestal of France’s unrivalled director of le grand amour .

The theme was disarmingly simple: Young widow, still pining for lost husband, meets daredevil racing driver at the boarding school their children attend. She finds herself drawn to him. They begin an affair overshadowed by their past lives, draw together, hesitate, break apart, reunite. . . .

Now Lelouch is back with the same cast--and all of them 20 years older. To do what?

“To find love again,” he said. “The first was like ‘Brief Encounter.’ It was a love story that never really had time to begin. This is a complete original. It’s not a sequel like a ‘Rocky’ or ‘Rambo.’ People change. You’re not making the life of the same person after 20 years.”

Aimee, a script girl in the first film, has now become a powerful and successful producer. Trintignant has gone back to his first love--racing fast cars--and, in the meantime, he has married again. Aimee, the career woman, has not. She decides instead to make a film about that vital part of her life--and to find the man who shared it with her.

Should the past be left alone? Or should you try to rekindle the ashes? That’s the question Lelouch sets out to answer.

“Rekindling the ashes? Of course it’s dangerous. That’s why it’s fascinating.” A Gallic shrug. “Making love is dangerous, but people do it! And a love story is like a national lottery. It’s a miracle if you win it!”

At 48, Lelouch exhibits a boyish eagerness, like the kid loose in the candy store. His enthusiasm is contagious. He’s here, there, everywhere. Up at 6 to get ready for the day’s shoot (civilized French hours of noon to 8 p.m.), in bed some time after 1 a.m. The best time, the only time, to catch him is over breakfast before he becomes embroiled in the day and gets lost forever.

“When we made the first one, we all kind of joked among ourselves, ‘If everything goes well, we’ll do a sequel in 20 years!’ Well, everything did go well,” Lelouch enthused.

“I thought about it after 10 years, and did nothing. But as 20 years approached, I thought, ‘I’ve always wanted to make a film about making a film. This could be my chance. . . . As I worked on it, I found it was the richest source of inspiration I had ever had in my life.

“Five years ago, I saw Anouk and Trintignant and found they were still magnificent! Like good wine, they had aged well.”

Certainly Aimee has. She’s 53, but you’d never believe it. Between takes she sat on Trintignant’s knee, talking intimately, her face buried in his shoulder. They are old friends, nothing more. She looked stunning in a royal blue bolero shawl over a tight black skirt and black stockings. Her pale face is exquisitely structured, the high cheekbones setting off the haunting dark eyes.

“After 20 years, it would be OK to rake over the coals again,” Lelouch said. “That would be permitted. Not after six years, or even 10. Too soon. But the 20th anniversary seemed somehow important. It represents a generation. It represents a life. It’s crazy what can happen in 20 years.”

“Script? What script? There isn’t one,” a bewildered Warner Bros. executive shrugged helplessly. He’d flown from California to discuss the launch of the film at the Cannes Film Festival last May--and found himself railroaded into being an extra when the movie went into production. (It wrapped last month.) The script resides in Lelouch’s head and on sheets of blank paper stuffed into his hip pocket, which fills up as the day progresses. His stars know the structure of the story, but not the nuts and bolts. The dialogue is supposed to flow fresh and clean, born of the moment. Lelouch has always worked this way.

“I live completely in the present. I write every day. It changes minute by minute. I know all the sequences, but one day can affect the next. It doesn’t unsettle the actors. On the contrary, when an actor reads a script and worries about it, that’s when he becomes nervous.

“There’s no spontaneity. The only reason for a script is to reassure the financiers. Better to give them a good book to read.” A dismissive shrug.

“When the camera is turning, that’s when miracles take place. The film is a success if it is able to capture the miracle. You have to be there for that moment. Like suddenly the sun shines or Anouk has an expression or a movement of her eyes, and I capture it. I love to make a film that is a succession of miracles.” A quick smile. “Miracles come my way because they know I’m ready for them.

“Most people have a big defect: They’re deaf and blind! They don’t look and they don’t listen. They’re not curious, so they don’t see anything. That’s why the cinema is a miracle for them. It forces them to look and listen. It shows them things they would never otherwise see.

“Everything I put on the screen I see all around me all day in my life. Artists are simply showing us things we’re not capable of seeing ourselves.”

Aimee, too, is delighted to be back with Lelouch, knowing his ways. “The first film came at the right moment. Like a meeting between two people that was pre-ordained by fate. It can be a beautiful love story, but it can also be too late or too early. And then it’s not the right moment.

“It was a film that made people dream. Maybe they don’t know it, but they’re ready to.” She seems to be echoing Lelouch’s own words.

Later on that evening, she sat in a corner of the dining room toying with a glass of red wine, smoking nervously. On the other side of the door, the bar pianist was pouring out the strains of “Love Walked In.”

“I remember the kind of films I loved. ‘Gone With the Wind.’ . . . ‘Tomorrow is another day’, remember? There was a film you could take home afterwards in your mind.

“I hope I’ll go on giving love to people. We’re living in a selfish age. We can only get away, survive, if we give.” After four husbands (among them Albert Finney) and numerous liaisons (among them a four-year sojourn with Ryan O’Neal), she is alone now, living in an elegant house in Paris’ 18th arrondissement with three dogs and 10 cats for company. “I’m a bachelor woman now. It doesn’t mean I prefer animals to people. Just that I’m very careful.”

Most of the cast and crew worked with Lelouch before. They talk of an “open, big, happy family.” Trintignant admitted: “We know the script we see in the morning will be changed the moment we get on the set. But it doesn’t matter. We know our characters. We know the story-line as much as we need to. That’s the way this man works. We can handle it--and he gives us a buzz, you know?”

Trintignant is one of the enduring heart-throbs of the European cinema. An ex-law student who gave up his studies at 20 to become an actor, he got over his shyness and a thick provincial accent and rose to fame via a well-publicized offscreen romance with Brigitte Bardot. His lasting appeal stems from the sense of ambiguity and mystery that he projects, whether the haunted look in the political thriller “Z” or the sudden warm smile that can light up his face as the romantic lead in so many of the 200 films he’s made.

Now 55, gray-bearded and enigmatic, Trintignant is “very pleased” to be back with Lelouch for the daily challenge it brings, the excitement of the unknown.

“In a way, it’s the same as love,” he says. “Because love is like a boat. It goes where the wind takes you. That’s what the film tells us.”