Let's Misbehave

By RICHARD CORLISS

SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN BEVERLY HILLS

Directed by Paul Bartel; Screenplay by Bruce Wagner

The big machines are parading by -- the Indiana Joneses and Star Treks and Ghostbusters -- wearing roman numerals like kill counts on their armor plate. In a steamroller summer, what's a low-budget comedy to do? Strut as brightly and bawdily as possible. Anyway, that is the tactic of the new film from Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul), which intrudes on the monster-movie scene like a kid blowing a May Day raspberry in Red Square.

There's not much class, but plenty of struggle, at the Lipkin mansion in Beverly Hills. Oh, sure, the rich know brand names: Harry Winston's jewels drape each mandarin wrist, and much Steuben Glass stands about, waiting to be shattered; and at the funeral for the Lipkins' pet pooch, Michael Feinstein plays piano. But the Lipkins and the Hepburn-Saravians, their haughty next- door neighbors, are egalitarians when considering where their next bedmate should come from. By the end of a weekend in the country, two elegant matrons will have been seduced by their former husbands, one of whom is dead. And everybody upstairs will have slept with everybody downstairs.

$ Clare (Jacqueline Bisset), a onetime sitcom queen keen for a comeback, has buried her swinish husband Sidney (Paul Mazursky), who materializes and pledges his infernal love to her. Clare's neighbor, Lisabeth (Mary Woronov), has just moved in with her daughter Zandra (Rebecca Schaeffer) because the exterminators are at her house, removing every trace of her ex-husband. Now these women and two others must fend off, or hop on, a platoon of randy males: Lisabeth's wormy ex (Wallace Shawn); her playwright brother (Ed Begley Jr.); her invalid prodigy son (Barrett Oliver); and two manservants, sleazy, pansexual Frank (Ray Sharkey) and Juan, the sensitive stud (Robert Beltran). "We're from different stratagems of society," Juan croons to Lisabeth. "But I want to cross over. Like Ruben Blades."

The crossing of class and sexual borders is the rule in similar high comedies: Noel Coward's Hay Fever, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game, Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. But those were about flirtation; director Bartel (who also plays Clare's snooty diet doctor) wants to talk about performance. Though set in the right now, Scenes is really a nostalgia piece from the swinging '70s, when coupling could be a game without emotional consequence or physical risk.

Scenes is a game too, cunningly constructed, sleekly appointed, exuberantly performed by a cast that picks up where bad taste leaves off. This one is not for the kids. Even adults will need moral shock absorbers; Scenes spits out its wit like a Heathers for grownups. Its pleasures may seem arid or acid to anyone who couldn't enjoy, say, a Restoration comedy as it might be played on Dynasty. But in a season when most movies are remakes of most other movies, Scenes is an original. And if you are in the right black mood, you could laugh till your nose bleeds.