MOVIE REVIEWS : Something’s Fishy in ‘Caviar Rouge’

For 30 years French actor-writer-director Robert Hossein has been a virile, sullen presence on the screen, more effective in front of the camera than behind it. However, in his “Le Caviar Rouge” (opening today at the AMC Century 14) his touch is fatally heavy as star and auteur.

Adapted by Hossein and Frederic Dard from their novel, “Le Caviar Rouge” is an overly derivative, romantic spy fable set in Geneva, a city described to us as “subtle . . . cold . . . haunting . . . cruel as a sea gull.” Yuri (Ivan Desny), a witty, insinuating KGB colonel, has summoned his world-weary operative Alex (Hossein) and the lovely Nora (Candice Patou), who had left the service years before, to a decaying lakeside villa, once the Soviet consulate and, before the revolution, the home of a Russian prince.

Yuri tells Alex and Nora that a Soviet agent, an American, has been killed in Geneva, and that he believes one or the other of them is responsible. The apparent idea is that trapped in the villa, Alex and Nora, who had been lovers until she seduced the American in the line of duty, will break each other down and Yuri will have his culprit.

The point of the film’s highly contrived, hopelessly convoluted plot is to suggest the near-impossibility of distinguishing truth from fiction within the workings of the KGB. Released in France in pre- glasnost 1985, “Le Caviar Rouge” is in essence an ill-fated love story that at once laments the long-lost Russia of old, symbolized by the pre-revolutionary artifacts that cram the villa’s dark, rich candle-lit salon, and protests the soul-withering paranoia and oppression of the Soviet Union of the present.

“Le Caviar Rouge” is deeply felt: Hossein’s real name is the Slavic Hosseinoff. But he’s unable to balance the film’s pervasive sadness and determined fatalism with any humor or irony. He and Patou (his real-life wife in her film debut) are so relentlessly glum that they don’t draw us in.

You respect Hossein’s feelings, but he takes himself so very seriously that the film becomes overwhelmingly self-important and finally a bore. Indeed, the only time “Le Caviar Rouge” (Times-rated: Mature) really comes alive is when the urbane Desny, who’s worked with everyone from Ophuls, Lean and Antonioni to Fassbinder, makes his brief appearances.