MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘ELENA’ A CARROUSEL RIDE FOR ADULTS

Some films dazzle you, some amuse you and some provoke you. Jean Renoir’s lovely and mirthful 1956 “Elena et Les Hommes” (“Elena and Her Men”)--starting a week’s run today at the Nuart--does them all by turns.

It’s a carrousel of a film, a romantic fantasy of Venus among the generals, of roses and shoemakers, Gypsies and cannons, bordellos and balloons.

It was made in defiance of the films of its day, of the naturalism which had its roots in Renoir’s own ‘30s classics, “Grand Illusion” and “La Bete Humaine.” Turning backward, he fashioned a flower, set in the strange, cool, absolutely still studio air (lit ravishingly by his nephew, cameraman Claude Renoir) in an 1880s realm of grand and low illusions.

But the film failed totally with French and American audiences in 1956, despite Renoir’s prestige and the star cast of Jean Marais, Mel Ferrer and Ingrid Bergman at the height of her notoriety. (In America, it’s been shown only in a dubbed, cut version called “Paris Does Strange Things.”)

“Elena’s” greatest admirers, then and now, tend to be Renoir’s more passionate partisans--some of whom rank it near the top of his canon. You might justifiably ask: Aren’t they blinded by love?

What if they are? Is it that bad to be blinded by love? “Elena” is an elaborate game--and you have to play its games to enjoy it. Like a play, it’s split into three acts: one of Parisian boulevard romance, one of whirling farce and carnality (at a chateau that recalls “Rules of the Game”) and one of lyrical sentiment (set, slyly, in a brothel).

Questions of love and rules are at its very heart: Bergman’s Elena, a Polish princess, shakes two governments by sending a marguerite to a general, and then quells a revolt by kissing her other lover before the populace. This goddess fills a Venus’ function nobly by inspiring an artist (the priggish young pianist), a merchant (Pierre Bertin) and a warrior (Marais) before embracing a man of no ambition at all (Ferrer’s slightly over-weak Henri). Love and laziness are soulmates, which is perhaps why the camera seems so immovable. Its gaze, too, is passionate and languorous.

And behind all the seductive artifice lies a filtered reality: The film’s Gen. Rollan was based on France’s Boulanger--whose admirers provoked an 1880s crisis, and whose own love affair ended in a tragedy worthy of Max Ophuls.

But Elena belongs to no place or time. She is, as Renoir has remarked, Venus herself, dancing among perplexed, delighted mortals. More specifically, she is Ingrid Bergman--a woman of glowingly direct Scandinavian charm and sensuality, released here, fully and purely, at last.

You can see why the ‘50s audiences rejected Renoir’s Paris--and all its strange things. The problems of a multilingual cast (Renoir hated dubbing) made the shooting a hell, and the joy sometimes seems overcalculated. “Elena” has the elegant construction and brilliance of “The Rules of the Game” but not the fiery brio, the raw sensuousness and vigor. It doesn’t matter.

A flawed masterpiece is still worth it. This measured, roguish ballad of love and statecraft gives us again one of the cinema’s greatest directors and one of its supreme actresses. It’s a celebration of the sweetness of flesh, bacchanalia, the impermanence of conquerors and all the beauties of the night.