And Now...Ladies and Gentlemen
''And Now Ladies and Gentlemen,'' the new movie from French director Claude Lelouch, seems to have it all -- love, sex, romance, mysterious disease, blackouts, kismet, glamorous locales, Moroccans, Europeans, lite-jazz, and the shameless Jeremy Irons, as a lover, a jewel thief, and the pilot of the catamaran whose name is also the title of this lavishly torpid fantasy of crossed stars and puddle-deep musings.
Back in 1966, Lelouch made the classic bonbon ''A Man and a Woman,'' a movie whose breezy sexiness still courses through his system. But 37 years and about 40 films later, he has yet to tame it. This new movie concerns a man and a woman, as well: He steals; she sings. But it involves so many other men and women, pseudo-philosophical frippery, exquisitely well-placed products, and the dazzling camerawork that shows them all off, making it seems more like an engorged commercial.
Watching it is like flipping through the heavy fashion mag of your choice, in which scores of ad pages sometimes turn up an article or two. You can smell the perfume, but you can't smell the point. This couture-leisure business is nothing new to Irons, who recently starred in a series of Donna Karan print ads where his face was weary and moist next to Milla Jovovich, as they modeled linen garments in what looked like the Philippine jungle. Here, he plays Valentin Valentin, a globe-trotting Englishman who knocks off the Bulgari shops of London and Paris. The actor appears to be having a pretty good time: Irons shows up once in drag and earlier in a rubbery disguise that makes him look like the actor Seymour Cassel.
In the northern Morocco town of Fez, Valentin crosses paths with a lounge singer named Jane Lester, who has come down with the same mysterious brain disease that afflicts him. Together, Jane and Valentin do things like wrap fabric around their heads and make trips to the desert to see if the shrine recommended by a lady shaman actually works.
Jane is played by world-renowned chanteuse -- Patricia Kaas of the smoky voice and spangling blue-eyes, in her film debut. She's the classiest zombie ever to sing a ballad then forget the lyrics.
When an earlier fling sees Valentin off on a boat trip, she ties an expensive silk scarf around his neck. ''You'll probably need a god, and Hermes was the god of thieves,'' she offers.
Absurd as that is, Lelouch, who wrote the film with Pierre Leroux and Pierre Uytterhoeven, seems to believe in it. He believes in the movie's bourgeois pretensions and in its dopey mysticism. This conviction keeps the film from being even remotely funny in its silliness. ''And Now Ladies and Gentlemen'' is like a Bond picture with no spies or villains or car chases or gadgets or explosions. The central afflictions have no particular urgency. Yes, she's dying, so's he, but never mind: There are Moroccan towns in need of lounging about and mojitos that need slurping.
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