MOVIE REVIEWS : From France, Laughter and Romance : Relationships: Bertrand Blier upends traditional male fantasy in the seriously comic ‘Too Beautiful for You.’

In Bertrand Blier’s “Too Beautiful for You” (at the Royal), Gerard Depardieu plays a happily married car dealer with a model-perfect wife (Carole Bouquet) who falls swooningly in love with his frumpy temporary secretary (Josiane Balasko).

This may sound like a marital infidelity farce, but the mood is hypnotic and almost rhapsodically self-obsessed. Blier has often made movies that seem clocked to the metronome of his own dream-time. Films like “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs” and “Menage,” to name two of his most popular art-house hits, advance the plot in poetic leaps that make sense only retroactively.

Blier isn’t interested in traditional narrative successes, and that can make his movies a little maddening sometimes. Particularly, as in his new film, when the poetic linkages are so vague and “personal” that at times it seems as if the film we’re watching is only the residue of Blier’s unconscious imaginings.

Still, a residue from Blier is more interesting than the fully aware, fully worked out scenarios of most other filmmakers. Gerard Depardieu, a Blier perennial, is well-cast as the husky, smitten Bernard. When he first sees Colette, his secretary, we can understand his infatuation. Bernard may look like an affable lug but he has surprising emotional depths; it makes sense that he would be attracted to Colette, who proves to be not only his physical but his spiritual counterpart. Her frumpiness is as deceptive as his huskiness. There’s a sensual undertone to the dutiful, resigned dailiness of her life. She’s poised to be lifted into a lyrical realm of sex and comfort.

By casting the two women in Bernard’s life as polar opposites, at least in terms of their looks, Blier is setting up what at first appears to be an almost diagrammatic male fantasy. The fantasy is upended, of course: In the normal scheme of things, Bernard’s wife would be the frump, his mistress the goddess. That’s what’s so potentially humorous about Blier’s setup here. After Colette first meets Florence, she fumes at Bernard because she can’t understand why he might prefer her to his wife. She thinks he’s making weird fun of her.

But Blier doesn’t play the situation for laughs, and he doesn’t simply provide a standard reversal of fantasy expectations, either. For, as it turns out, Florence isn’t just a prettified cipher. She’s got depths of her own. She anguishes over her loss, and fights to get Bernard back. The more we see of these two women the harder it is to categorize them. Bernard, who is in love with the unfathomable, is, naturally enough, torn between them. They prove equal mysteries, equally out of reach.

In his earlier movies, Blier was famous for expressing the sort of uncensored male romantic fantasies that most filmmakers have the tact to avoid. The women in his films have almost always been species of the Other: lyrical creatures who confound men with their ultimate unknowability. In his new film, men are the Other too. In that sense, “Too Beautiful for You” (rated R for brief nudity), for all its humorlessness, is the film Blier has been working up to since the beginning of his career. Women and men are linked in the same trance-like continuum.

It’s a measure of how far-gone Blier is in this film that, given so many ripe opportunities for comedy, he remains resolutely serious. With Pedro Almodovar and David Lynch, Blier is probably the most original comic talent to come along in the movies in the past decade or so. “Too Beautiful for You” certainly resonates with his earlier work, but in academic ways that don’t always excite.

The hallucinatory dourness of what Blier has given us can’t quite compensate for the lyric comic highs of his best work. Blier can’t, or doesn’t want to, separate out his own fantasies from Bernard’s. That’s why the film seems so involuted and personal in ways that don’t always connect with an audience. Blier identifies so strongly with Bernard’s spiritual-romantic dilemma that he doesn’t recognize the raving narcissism at its core.

The film is really about how Bernard needs both halves of the mystery--Colette and Florence--and how he will never be satisfied. The women’s dissatisfactions are not presented with the same heft as Bernard’s, and so, at its worst, the movie is like the sanctification of some spoiled pasha who can’t decide which concubine to idealize. Quelle problem !

As good as Depardieu is in this film, the two actresses are equally fine (particularly Balasko, noted in France for her comic roles). They deserve a few more drafts of Blier’s ah-sweet-mystery-of-the-sexes elixir. It’s possible to admire this film and still feel cheated.

‘TOO BEAUTIFUL FOR YOU’

An Orion Classics release. Director Bertrand Blier. Cinematography Philippe Rousselot. Screenplay Bertrand Blier. Production design Theobald Meurisse. Costumes Michele Marmande-Cerf. Music Franz Schubert. Film editor Claudine Merlin. With Gerard Depardieu, Josiane Balasko, Carole Bouquet, Roland Blanche.