Woman Talk

By RICHARD CORLISS

ENTRE NOUS

Directed and Written by Diane Kurys

Here's a generalization to ponder:

American movies are male; French films are female. Hollywood has always been a tough-guy's town, with its strutting moguls and its smile-when-you-call-me-an-artist directors. And the virtues it has traditionally valued are masculine ones: energy, efficiency, power, animus, each melodramatic plot resolved with a sock to the jaw. From French films one has come to expect delicacy, grace, comradely tenderness, a ruminative intelligence. Their directors seem to inhabit an exalted sorority where girlish high spirits, sage whispers and rueful endearments reverberate in the hallways. So leave it to French Film Maker Diane Kurys to devise, in Entre Nous, a bittersweet domestic epic that reconciles feminism with femininity.

In personal as well as international relations, wartime France created odd alliances and fierce resistance. Lena (Isabelle Huppert), a Belgian Jew, emerged from an internment camp with her sad-sack husband Michel (Guy Marchand) and a handmade marital straitjacket. Madeleine (Miou Miou) saw her glamorous first husband die from enemy gunfire in the town square, then fell into a pleasureless marriage with a slimy hustler named Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri). By 1952, when most of Entre Nous takes place, each woman is eager to escape the emotional claustrophobia of cooking the meals, chaperoning the children, counterfeiting passion as Monsieur Wrong rolls toward her in bed. To the anger and chagrin of their husbands, Lena and Madeleine find that ecstatic escape in each other's souls.

Entre Nous looks at its characters with an acute bifocal vision. The women are modern feminist figures marooned in the stay-at-home '50s; the men's attitudes, sympathetic at the time, have a touch of the Neanderthal about them today.

Kurys' achievement is to be both critical and understanding about both periods and all four people. Is Lena a brave enough revolutionary to open her own boutique? Then she will be stern enough to parade her indifference before Michel.

Is he a jealous brute who will beat his wife and try to demolish her store? Yes--and he will plead with Lena (in the film's most affecting scene) to help him reconstruct his fantasy of a happy marriage. Does Madeleine have every right to desert the sleazy Costa? Of course--but in doing so she follows her star, at least temporarily, right out of Lena's life.

There is one more question--Do these loving women become lovers?--that Kurys, with a discretion worthy of the '50s, allows the viewer's imagination to answer. Her direction of two terrific actresses is just as discreet and telling.

Huppert, too often the ice maiden of French movies (The Lacemaker, Loulou), merges sugar and steel to embody the superior, frustrated Lena. In her face and gestures, Miou Miou finds reasons for each of Madeleine's enigmatic quirks.

Marchand is splendid too: he can trip over his feelings or break the viewer's heart with equal dexterity. At film's end Kurys reveals that Marchand and Huppert are playing the director's own parents, 30 troubled years ago. Autobiography is often the excuse for retrospective vindictiveness, but Kurys is too mixed in her sympathies, too talented at her craft, to harbor such notions. She knows that filming well is the best revenge. --By Richard Corliss