And Now... Ladies and Gentlemen

Claude Lelouch's films regularly border on a kind of Mills and Boon romantic kitsch and this story about a French jazz singer (Patricia Kaas) and a British jewel thief (Jeremy Irons) both suffering from amnesia who meet in Morocco whilst trying to get away from unhappy relationships is no exception. Added to this typically romantic fantasy template, Lelouch tries to spice up the plot with a time-hopping narrative that serves to dissipate rather than increase interest.

Part light-hearted thriller (a kind of updating of To Catch A Thief, 1955), part epigrammatic disquisition on the shortcomings of l'amour, the closing sequence, which has a song hybridizing English and French kyrics and Jeremy Irons clumsily pretending to play the trumpet, pretty much sums up the limitations of this pastiche.

Whilst some of the film is just plain silly, like Irons supposedly fooling Parisian jewellers, Bulgari, that he is a wealthy upper-class patron, mostly it is ill-judged, having many elements of potential that are combined in such way as to be self-defeating and the outcome largely unconvincing.

 

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