MOVIE REVIEW : STEAMY SUSPENSE AND STEAMY ROMANCE : ‘A Man in Love’ Capitalizes on a Backstage Romance

One does not kill oneself for love of a woman, but because love--any love--reveals us in our nakedness, our misery, our vulnerability, our nothingness . . .

--Cesare Pavese

Throughout her career, Diane Kurys has been so autobiographical--partly revealing her childhood in “Entre Nous” and “Peppermint Soda,” and her youth in “Cocktail Molotov”--that it’s tempting to scour her latest film, “A Man in Love” (selected theaters) for possible personal tidbits. Does this steamy, rich backstage romance about movie co-stars and their Roman-Parisian fling make use of any disguised Kurys memoirs?

It’s hard to imagine how. The movie director here, Dante Pizani (Jean Pigozzi), is a man--a pudgy enfant terrible of Italian theater. He doesn’t look interested in sex; much of the time he doesn’t look too interested in the movie he’s making, either. The actors carry the torch instead: Peter Coyote as Steve Elliott, an arrogant American movie star, and Greta Scacchi as Jane Steiner--a Parisian stage actress. Sparks whoosh up when they meet on a Cinecitta sound stage and an adulterous affair is ignited--an affair hidden from Elliot’s wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), clucked over by his co-workers and aided by his personal assistant, Michael (Peter Riegert).

Kurys shifts the viewpoint, sometimes plunging us subjectively into the lovers’ embraces, sometimes pulling back to drench the whole affair in a quiet irony. An expert at intimate emotions, she catches the flavor and tempo of most backstage romances, the sense of impermanence, overdramatization, even desperation. And the clock-race foreboding: the fear that when the project ends, the lovemaking might too.

In the film, it’s a repeated reflexive joke that we confuse the on-screen passion of Elliot and Jane’s characters with Elliot and Jane themselves; a scene seemingly about them will turn out to be part of their film. So, it may be a minor flaw that Kurys hasn’t developed a different camera style for “director” Pizani--or that “his” scenes, while they’re being shot, flow together without new takes or camera replacements. Despite that, the passions in that inner film--a portrayal of Italian writer Cesare Pavese--seem so much grander, that the off-screen affair seems to be racing to overtake it.

The spirit of Pavese hovers over both. An ultra-romantic figure, whose suicide at 41 was triggered by a last unhappy love affair, Pavese was an anachronism: a longtime Marxist who adored American literature, the translator of Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Melville (his favorite) and others. The mood in his own novels--spare, tormented, aestheticized and sad--is almost identical to the mood of his admirer and adapter, Michelangelo Antonioni. But Kurys doesn’t try for that kind of keen austerity. As before, she works for spontaneity, warmth--a sense of community, however divided.

In her story, it’s Coyote’s Elliott who has engineered the movie. The irony lies in the contrast: Pavese was a failure with women, Elliott a success, a seducer who juggles affairs, deceives his wife and is playing subtle actor’s games in his affair with Jane. Elliott manipulates things, perhaps unconsciously, so he can taste the salts of this sad poet’s doom, without suffering the consequences. The final irony is that he does suffer, like everyone else.

Peter Coyote is one of the few current star American movie actors who can radiate cold intellect; at his best, he reminds you of Bogart right before stardom. Yet perhaps he gives too cold, too controlled, a performance here. As always, he is good in his angry scenes and he gets Elliott’s vanity, self-delusion and edginess. But, when he is tender, he seems a little blank, maybe too cerebral.

Scacchi, in a less complex role, puts a sumptuous sweetness, sexiness and heat into her scenes; they flare up. Her Jane is a more instinctive romantic, feeling naturally what Elliot tries to sting awake in himself. As her parents, Claudia Cardinale and John Berry occasionally triumph over more sentimentally written parts. Curtis is also excellent; she gets such bitterness and pain into her brief scenes as Elliott’s wife that they almost unbalance the whole--as if this cameo role deserved to be enlarged.

The movie’s finest performance comes from Peter Reigert as Michael, Elliott’s discreetly brash gofer. Reigert--for whom the part was written--plays Michael as a glib Brooklynite with sneaky-swift reflexes beneath a casual, baby-fat facade: the sunny, shifty, constantly re-adjusting temperament of a professional cheerleader and whipping-post. He gives us subtle hints of submerged self-abasement while keeping Michael deliciously spry and comic.

“A Man in Love” (Times-rated: Mature, for sex and nudity)--though beautifully shot by Bernard Zitzerman and lushly scored by Georges Delerue--is basically an actors’ show. Good as it is, it doesn’t touch the heights of the best European films about film makers: Fellini’s “8 1/2,” Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” Godard’s “Contempt” or “Passion,” Reisz’s “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,” or Antonioni’s “Identification of a Woman.”

Perhaps Kurys closes in too relentlessly on the lovers; perhaps she doesn’t develop the ensemble enough; perhaps her English dialogue is not as fluid or nuanced as her French. The film is more complex that it first seems, the affair not as dangerous or pathetic as it should be. But there is passion in Kurys’ film, and courage and intelligence. If it misses, it’s an honorable miss, one made with humanity and love.

‘A MAN IN LOVE’ A Cinecom Pictures release of an Alexandre Films co-production. Executive Producer Michel Seydoux. Director/script Diane Kurys. Music Georges Delerue. Art director Dean Tavoularis. Camera Bernard Zitzerman. Editor Joele Van Effenterre. With Peter Coyote, Greta Scacchi, Jamie Lee Curtis, Claudia Cardinale, Peter Riegert, John Berry, Vincent Lindon.

Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

Times-rated: mature (Sex, nudity.)