A COURTSHIP OF A ‘COUSIN’ PAID OFF

The struggle behind a movie is sometimes as interesting as the movie turns out to be. In this case the movie hasn’t even been made yet, but the struggle is already 2 years old and seems to have been scripted jointly by M. Hulot and Franz Kafka.

An actor-turned-producer named William Allyn, whose best-known credit is “Rich and Famous,” George Cukor’s final film, decided that an American version of the 1976 French romantic comedy, “Cousin, Cousine,” would have real and timely merit. He set out in 1985 to negotiate the rights.

Exactly why the negotiations with Jean-Charles Tacchella, who made the film, and Gaumont, which financed it and co-owned it with him, should have been so long and frustrating is not entirely clear.

But Allyn says it took a half-year to locate and win a response from Tacchella, who then remembered that he and Allyn had sat together and chatted amiably at a testimonial for Cukor when “Rich and Famous” opened in Paris.

Then the lawyers, who seemed to be operating with quill pens and carrier pigeons, became involved and things really shifted into slow motion.

“We would agree on a point, then six months later it would be brought up for discussion again,” Allyn remarked last week. “I flew from London to Paris for a meeting I was told would only take five minutes; it took five hours.”

Meanwhile, on the assurance that an agreement would be reached, Allyn put a writer, playwright Stephen Metcalfe, to work on the adaptation and convinced Paramount to finance and distribute the picture. Still the delays continued, including the Great Blackout of August, 1986, when, as it does each August, the whole country of France closed for vacation and no one could be found.

But at last the signed and notarized contracts arrived from Paris--signed in all the wrong places so that they had to be redone.

You might have thought some great appellate court in the sky was trying to deliver a message, but at very long last, earlier this month, the papers, properly autographed, were delivered, and all’s well that ends on the dotted line.

The question lurking beyond the hassles is, naturally, whether the transposition of tales from one culture to another really works. Another is why “Cousin, Cousine” should strike Allyn as particularly ripe for an American version a decade after the original was released here.

In Tacchella’s story, Marie-Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux are married, but not to each other. They are cousins by marriage who meet at a vast family wedding. Her husband is a compulsive chaser (Guy Marchand), his wife is a compulsive flirt (Marie-France Pisier).

The lovers try to resist what the viewer knows in 10 seconds is inevitable, and theirs becomes a charming love story, although it occurs within Tacchella’s sharp and even nasty depictions of the hypocrisies and double-dealings of life in the bourgeoisie.

But as a love story, both mature and tender, it is terrific. And that, Allyn says, is the lure. “Simple,” he says. “It’s a celebration of love, a wonderful celebration of true love, and I think we’re ready for it.”

The present intention is to relocate the story in the New York suburbs, amid extended middle-class families equivalent to those in the original. If any casting has been thought about, it is being kept under Allyn’s hat.

The film goer’s first impulse about almost any remake, I think, is to say: Let it alone; don’t muddle my cherished memories of the original. The vaults are strewn with failures--adaptations in which the charm of the original casting could not be equaled, or in which the cultural differences could not finally be wrenched into another society.

Yet Allyn may well be right that in terms of its theme “Cousin, Cousine” can find an American home, because it is finally not about adulteries running amok, but about the search for the one meaningful partner, to be held onto despite the polite hypocrisies.

“They lived happily ever after” is a universal notion, but the movies in recent years have forgotten it, in all the better languages. Tacchella remembered it, or at least implied it, and as much as anything, the notion triggered Allyn’s two-year courtship of the French.