MOVIE REVIEW : Couple’s Fusion in ‘Kung Fu’ Too French for U.S. Tastes

Ah, the French. Up to their old tricks of making crazy Americans feel out of step with what these cosmopolites take so comfortably in stride. Take Agnes Varda’s “Kung Fu Master!” (Goldwyn Pavilion Thursday), a movie devoted to the absolute denial of psychological effect.

French to the core, it is about truly “crazy love,” an affair between divorcee Mary Jane (Jane Birkin)--who is 40 and lives with her two daughters, ages 6 and 15--and 15-year-old Julien (Mathieu Demy), a schoolmate of her daughter Lucy’s.

Birkin herself wrote the original story, which Varda altered slightly and which is cast within the family and shot at Birkin’s pretty, comfortable Paris house. Varda’s own son, Mathieu, is the boy; Birkin’s two daughters, 6-year-old Lou Doillon and 16-year-old Charlotte Gainsbourg, play her girls, Lou and Lucy. It doesn’t help the creepy quality one bit.

No one who saw the French “Devil in the Flesh” of 1947 could fail to understand the young married woman’s fascination with that 17-year-old schoolboy. Director Autant-Lara made that absolutely clear, particularly when he cast Gerard Philipe as Raymond Radiguet’s autobiographical adolescent, a boy struggling to manhood in the context of the First World War.

That was youth; this is sub-adolescence. Indulge this movie to the hilt, and you still come back to the question of what is lacking in this adult woman’s life that would make her rush to re-create the dopiness of an adolescent’s first crush. Or why she is so quick to sacrifice the psychological well-being of the two children she already has for this particularly blank sweet kid. With a Gallic shrug, the film makers make no effort to tell us. It’s a given. You know. Well, try my damnedest, I don’t know.

Mary Jane, profession unstated, is struck by Julien after helping him throw up, since he has indulged in a nasty vodka-beer-wine mixture at Lucy’s outdoor party. Mary Jane’s younger daughter has a fever and, singing gently to her upstairs a little later, Mary Jane catches Julien studying her. She decides that he is “superb.”

After she runs into him, literally and only semi-accidentally, at the school, they share a Coca-Cola and she watches him, wrapped up in his favorite video game, Kung Fu Master, which he plays “with such skill and such passion.” In it, the maiden on the top floor must be rescued by the little pajama-clad hero, after he vanquishes demons of every kind.

Now, almost any woman will tell you that there is a powerful aphrodisiac in watching a man absorbed in something he does well, from messing with a car motor to putting a mathematical equation on a blackboard, to turning out an omelet. And there are qualities about adolescence that have their own undeniable appeal; a stray curl at the nape of a neck, an endearing bravado that covers inexperience.

But watching a man, who may have a few more things in his head, and fixating on an absorbed child are two quite different matters. Except, perhaps, to the French. Beyond Julien’s passion for his game, Varda doesn’t tell us anything about him, except that he may want mothering. (Both his parents are a convenient continent away.) Actor Mathieu is big-eyed and grave and obviously the apple of his own mother’s eye. But he is not terribly interesting and, rather than 15, he looks two or three years younger, which makes the movie feel really pathologic. (It is MPAA-rated R for the relative discretion of their nuzzling love scenes.)

So when he begins to turn up with daffodils for Mary Jane, and she, our narrator, begins to talk about his phone calls, which “thrilled” her, the non-French mind may reel.

Presumably this is shy, pure romance. A respite from “grown-up” behavior. An unpressured process of learning to love. Well, if Mary Jane lived by herself, that might be one thing. But she’s responsible for two other young lives. And when she and Julien take off for her family’s island--taking 6-year-old Lou with them, abruptly leaving Lucy behind with her maternal grandparents--where are our sympathies supposed to lie? Varda cares so little about anyone but this pathetic little couple that we’re never even shown Lucy’s reaction, as though her feelings were beside the point.

And how are we supposed to feel about this semi- triste island idyll, just momma, her baby and her baby-love? What do we make of the moment when Mary Jane confesses shyly, “I’m too old for you. . . . I know I won’t be around when you start shaving.” The closest thing to a comment about little Lou’s presence here is one shot of her, wailing, unattended, at the water’s edge.

The movie makes much of French adolescents’ understandable preoccupation with AIDS. The bottom line of AIDS is responsibility for those one cares about. Perhaps it is only the French who worry about sexual responsibility yet behave as though psychological responsibility was something only the unsophisticated troubled about. The unsophisticated and those crazy Americans.