THE SCREEN

...and like everything else we've seen since the first scene, it seems calculated by Davy to suggest that the real Claudine is completely auto-erotic and narcissistic...

...Exhibition begins with a scene in which Claudine is watching footage of herself copulating with several men...

...Like two of Ritchie's earlier films-Downhill Racer and The Candidate-Smile is about the hoopla of public competition...

...And it's certainly true that life in Santa Rosa is, like those rehearsals, an unremitting slapstick of flubs, bloopers, missed cues, bad timing, inexperience and plain lack of talent...

...Like one of the girls falling off the stage during the rehearsals, Little Bob blows his chance to photograph the girls in their dressing room by falling over the janitor, prostrate with drink in the buses outside...

...It's addressed to the people in the film, who are contestants at a fictitious California regional for the "Young American Miss Pageant...

...The analyse that is supposed to accompany it is a complete fraud...

...Davy asks Claudine leading, suggestive and vaguely disapproving questions, and she, being a professional and seeing what his drift is, gives him what he wants-a lot of lurid, degrading stories about her background...

...Auto-analyse" is what the French Ministry of Culture called it, anyway, when its control board certified this film for legitimate distribution, making it the first hardcore film ever to receive such government sanction...

...After an hour or so of watching her contrive in the interviews a life and a personality she thinks will please us, the straight scenes of copulation, lesbianism and masturbation begin to look like some good, clean fun...

...Every character's life seems to be the same sort of dance routine that the girls must work so hard to learn -a little series of painfully rehearsed, ludicrously obvious two-steps done over and over and over again...

...Whether this is so or not we'll never know, for despite the film's claim to auto-analyse, this auto-erotisme is all we get...

...By the end Ritchie wants us to be sitting on the edge of our seats, waiting for the winners to be announced...

...What makes Smile funny is the way it transfers the atmosphere of this public event to the private lives of the people involved in it...

...But on the other hand, the film and some of its cast grew out of his experiences as judge at a real beauty contest, and the final night of the pageant was staged as a real contest too, with a paying audience...

...Chairwoman Brenda DiCarlo (Barbara Feldon) listlessly tells her husband every time he approaches her that she has a headache...

...Perhaps it is because the emotions in his film's ending are genuine in this sense that Ritchie gives in to them himself, and tries to get us to do the same...

...Maybe Ritchie came to be of two minds about his characters because his film developed as such a peculiar mixture of reality and fantasy, a blend of documentary and fiction footage...

...This scene is far and away the most convincing erotic display Claudine gives in the film...

...Pageant chairman "Big Bob" Freelander (Bruce Dern) cheerfully tells everyone who approaches him, "No rest for the weary this week...

...It's on those very carpets that Brenda's husband decides to shoot her instead of himself, thus forcing her (more bad timing) to attend the pageant finale with a flesh wound...

...Davy has his own analyse of Claudine, however, and and it is this which dominates the film...

...When Brenda's husband decides to confide in Big Bob about his marital problems, he unwittingly makes it a public performance by unburdening himself within range of the public-address mike at the drive-in where they're eating...

...The janitor of the Santa Rosa Veterans Memorial Auditorium keeps pulling bottles of gin out of the woodwork, Big Bob's nine-year-old son, Little Bob, keeps getting into fist-fights with friends over their scheme to sell nude photographs of the contestants, and the token Mexican-American contestant keeps giving out crocks of guaca-moli dip to the contest judges...

...At least in them we recognize what people are doing and know what interest we are supposed to be taking in it...

...In the end Ritchie wants us to love his characters as well as despise them...

...If Smile ultimately loses some of its zing, it's because Ritchie isn't pitiless enough...

...As this contestant becomes more and more involved in the pageant, Ritchie tries to draw us in too in sympathy with her...

...Where Ritchie sentimentalizes his approach in order, perhaps, to give it a wider appeal, Davy intellectualizes his for the same reason...

...A somewhat similar ambivalence of the real and the illusory, the documentary and the fictitious, exists in Jean-Francois Davy's Exhibition, though the result in this film is something much more insidious than in Smile...

...Wife Brenda's home even looks like the pageant, with paper runners for walking over freshly shampooed carpets like the runways down which the girls parade in the auditorium...

...The heart of Ritchie's film is the pageant rehearsals, where the girls learn those two-steps they will have to do on judgment night...

...It's decent, but it's not funny...

...What Smile does is trace the lives of both the contestants and the contest officials during the days leading up to the regional finals in Santa Rosa, California...

...Unlike Robert Alt-man, whose Nashville Smile resembles in some regards, Ritchie has unfortunately mixed feelings about his victims...

...The film's ending (somehow "climax" seems too appropriate a term here) is a scene in which we watch Claudine masturbate for about five minutes...

...After we have had so much fun at the girls' expense, it's only decent, I guess, to try to see it their way in the end...

...For one thing, the later scenes in the film are longer than the early ones, which automatically makes them more dramatic...

...and as in those films, so here, there is a central character who acquires a real taste for competing after at first being very reluctant and uncertain...

...On the one hand, his story and characters are fictitious...

...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...

...But as the pageant brochure, from which Big Bob so often quotes, undoubtedly points out, it is for life itself, not just the pageant, that these girls are really rehearsing...

...Like the performances given by the contestants, the lives lived by the characters in this film are entertaining because they're so clutzy...

...The difference this time is the "auto-analyse" that Claudine puts herself through in a series of interviews Davy intercuts with the standard hard-core footage...

...He wants us to participate in the contest, to get caught up in the spirit of the thing, as well as remain aloof so we can laugh at it all...

...The tension Ritchie tries to build up with this change of pace in the ending is really something of a let-down for us...

...Davy, who is France's premier director of hard-core pornograhy, has as his subject in this film Claudine Beccarie, who is France's premier star of hard-core and a woman Davy has often directed before...