|  "  R  e  n  d  e  z  v  o  u  s      i  n      P  a  r  i  s  "  |  

Directed by Eric Rohmer

FRENCH BON-BON Eric Rohmer's "Rendezvous in Paris" offers three tales of romantic perversity By LAURA MILLER the French filmmaker Eric Rohmer is either romantic love's greatest champion or its worst enemy. Or perhaps both. Through two series of feature films -- first "Six Moral Tales," of which the best known are "My Night at Maud's" and "Claire's Knee," and then "Comedies and Proverbs," which includes "Pauline at the Beach" -- he has tracked his quarry as doggedly as Javert hunted Jean Valjean in "Les Miserables." In fact, the only force more single-minded than Rohmer himself would be a typical Rohmer character, a young, middle-class Frenchwoman or man who, seized by an obsessive desire, pursues it to the bittersweet end. Everything in Rohmer's movies conspires to alienate a sensible viewer. The characters yammer on endlessly about their amorous moods and philosophies, all of which are subject to change at any moment. Combine this claustrophobic focus with Rohmer's austere imagery (he uses natural light and muted production design) and the result is a distillation of the worst side of the French character -- its narcissism and fetishization of sentiment -- without the sensual celebration that often redeems it. However, Rohmer proves that sometimes shriveled fruit yields the strongest juice, provided you squeeze hard enough. The more tenaciously his characters chase their dreams, the more contrived those dreams appear. If only because they traffic in it, few movies fully chart the perversity of what literary critic Harold Bloom calls the "psychic disease" of romantic love, and Eric Rohmer has made most of them. But is he then a cynic? Since his most maddening characters (the grumpy Cinderella of 1985's "Summer" and the trifling Sleeping Beauty of 1991's "A Tale of Winter") usually wind up getting their heart's desire, it's hard to say. In "Rendezvous in Paris," Rohmer offers three brief tales, none of which has the time to blossom into an epic of pigheadedness to match his last two features. Instead they offer wispy bits of romance, each a bon-bon with a stone center. The first story -- in which, through a series of coincidences, an infatuated girl winds up catching her boyfriend courting another woman -- is the lightest of the bunch, not much more than an episode of "Love American Style." The following two have a bit more substance. The case for Rohmer's cynicism gets a boost from the cheesy framing device he employees, a pair of buskers in striped shirts and berets playing the accordion and singing about love on a cobblestone street: There are lots of stories Some are failures, some are glories On the streets of Paris You laugh and then you cry. Despite this patent kitsch (then again, it's hard to overestimate the French investment in their own mystique), the lyrics have their truth, although most of the people rendezvousing in this film do more crying than laughing. In "The Benches of Paris," a couple meets in a series of Parisian parks, and she explains why she is not yet ready to leave her current lover, how she doesn't love either of them, how she insists on conducting this affair in an entirely different way in order to maintain her "originality," how this is "theoretically, a situation I detest," how the idea of visiting him at home offends her sense of delicacy. In short, she elevates her caprices to the status of idols and he joins her in worshipping them. To him she is "always mysterious," the very embodiment of the imperious, mercurial ideal of French femininity, which is exactly what she turns out to be in the end. The final segment, "Mother and Child," features a character every bit as annoying as the bench girl: a self-important young painter given to making long speeches regarding his artistic theories ("With a landscape, I become a camera. I paint them to be bathed in a type of light. . . Picasso had everything but space and light," etc.). On a blind date with a cheerful Swedish interior decorator, he denounces the color and cleanliness she admires and soon deserts her to pursue a young woman he spots on the street. He invites the stranger to look at his work and they have a long, oblique conversation about love and art. The most enigmatic of the three, this rendezvous seems to be teasing out the difference between mere taste and genuine understanding, a distinction its callow hero intuits but hasn't quite mastered. While "Rendezvous in Paris" bears Rohmer's unmistakable stamp (and makes an appetizing lagniappe before the pending release of his next serious feature, "A Tale of Summer"), the form doesn't really suit his genius. He blossoms when he submits trifles to prolonged and relentless scrutiny; with a 20-minute vignette this means he stops just as the story begins to graduate from anecdote to insight. There is no one who can match him at his full-fledged, irritating, revelatory best, but we shall have to be as patient as one of his own heroines until he offers us that again.