A Man In Love

Diane Kurys, the French director who made the superb Entres Nous (Between Us), here delivers a heavy-handed dud. Peter Coyote plays Steve Elliott, a tortured actor who has sought and landed the lead role in a film about the last days of Cesare Pavese, an Italian poet who committed suicide at the age of 42. His co-star is Jane Steiner (Greta Scacchi). On the set, the two fall in love. Coyote is married to Jamie Lee Curtis, and Scacchi has a stage director boyfriend living in Paris. Unfortunately, the spark that apparently lights Coyote's and Scacchi's fire--throwing their other relationships to the wind--is never revealed. A subplot, involving Scacchi's dying mother (Claudia Cardinale), is tossed in to flesh out a rather meager storyline. The problem here is that Coyote only sounds "tormented" when he's quoting Pavese. As the actor Steve Elliott, he's a dime a dozen. Maybe Steve Elliott can't see the intellectual and sensitivity gap between him and Pavese, but Kury's should have. As it is, she's taken the most hackneyed subject in the world--the woes of the artist--and grafted it onto the equivalent of an afternoon soap opera. The result is pretentious claptrap. Not recommended. (See DOLLS for availability).