Disconnections

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

BLUE COUNTRY

Directed and Written by Jean-Charles Tacchella

A man and a woman (well played by Jacques Serres and Brigitte Fossey) fall in love, but refuse to marry or even move in together for fear that surrender of independence will distort their personalities and spoil the pleasant relationship they already enjoy. All over the lovely corner of Provence that they share with the native-born peasantry and Parisians escaping city life, similar failures of connection are taking place. A man on the verge of old age makes a fool of himself by pursuing a sometime trapeze artist who slept with him once, but now rejects him with comical callousness. It seems that she went to bed with him only because he reminded her of a sailor she missed an assignation with when she was 14. A middle-aged woman keeps having seriocomic fights with the daughter and son-in-law she is trying to live with. She rejects a bus driver whose intentions are honorably dishonorable--and might offer a means of escape--in order to talk the night away with a homosexual.

This is not to imply that all the misunderstandings of self and others in Blue Country involve sex. A man sells his farm in order to live in a city apartment, then decides to take up farming again. The normally equable Fossey becomes a raging hysteric whenever she encounters a man who she thinks is selling poisonously nonorganic food to her fellow citizens. Serres, convinced that a friend is being driven to suicide by a brother-in-law's financial misdealings, sets out to beat some sense into the miscreant. Naturally he sets upon the wrong man. But no matter. His friend pulls back from self-destruction, but later goes ahead and kills himself anyway.

And so it goes. Ordinary, likable people persistently misunderstand themselves, their needs and desires, and there fore misunderstand their equally befuddled neighbors. In the hands of someone other than Tacchella, all of this might be the stuff of tragedy, or at least of psychoanalytic melodrama. But Tacchella seems to be convinced that eccentricity is the best measure of our humanity, some thing to be treasured and explored rather than deplored. His way is simply to record in quick sketches each little absurdity his camera catches, give a rueful Gallic shrug and move briskly on. If such a thing is possible, he is profoundly unprofound. People, he says, are prisoners of their generally misinformed ideas about themselves and about what constitutes happiness. But there is a cheery Catch-22: in their waywardness people probably do themselves no more harm, and very possibly less, than if they knew better what they were doing.

Blue Country has even less of a plot than Tacchella's Cousin, Cousine and of fers less romantic consolation than that extraordinarily popular movie. A kind of pastoral "Hecksapoppin," it is, like its predecessor, full of rich comic types and amusing asides. Above all, it makes you feel good as you leave the theater, which is more than you generally find in a comedy these days.

--Richard Schickel

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