Gay Birds

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

LA CAGE AUX FOLLES Directed by Edouard Molinaro Screenplay by Francis Veber, Edouard Molinaro, Marcello Danon, Jean Poiret

La Cage aux Folles is a sort of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (with overtones of Father of the Bride) for the '70s.

It is a comedy about the chaos and confusion that occur when two families who don't know each other and who have, to say the least, conflicting values, meet for dinner. Their aim is to cooperate in a civilized manner in the marriage of their only children. The girl's father is a French politician noted for his devotion to an organization known as the Union of Moral Order. It is supposed to rescue traditional standards from their assault by wayward modernism. The boy's father (Ugo Tognazzi) is a homosexual. But not just any ordinary homosexual. He is the owner of the nightclub whose name--it means "Birds of a Feather"--gives the film its title. The club features drag queens, notably Zaza (Michel Serrault), Dad's lover of 20 years. Zaza is so into his role that now, having reached a certain age, he is giving a first-rate impersonation of a menopausal hysteric.

Sounds like a very strained jape, doesn't it? Well, it is not. Indeed, this may turn out to be the warmest comedy of the year. For father really loves son, and would do anything to secure his happiness, while Zaza is really a very nice person underneath his plumage and his craziness. The girl has told her parents that her beloved's father is the Italian consul in Nice. Fine, then Zaza will act that role.

Out go all the gay trappings of this fine-feathered nest, and in come crosses and furniture that would be too severe for a monastery. Another crisis occurs when the boy's real mother, hastily recruited for the occasion, is delayed. Very well, Zaza will do his hilarious best to fill in -- even though he is, if anything, less able to play a straight woman than a straight man.

There are, along the way, some marvelous set pieces, most especially when Zaza is taking lessons in how a man sits in a chair or butters toast.

But what really makes the picture work, beyond the expert playing of Tognazzi and Serrault and the deft construction of the plot (adapted from a classically well-built French stage farce), is the attitudes -- or, rather, lack of attitudes -- of all concerned. The film accepts the gays as generously as it accepts the girl's rectitudinous parents. Though the gays must make eccentric adjustments to the exigencies of living, their behavior is viewed as no more unusual than the quirks everyone develops to get through the day as pleasantly as possible. Given a little good will and a lot of mad improvisation (and not too many strains on our dignity), we can all make it. Or so says this giddy, unpretentious and entirely lovable film in its quite original way.

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