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...This vision of modern life is so nearly ubiquitous, it has such authority with us, that it is practically part of the reality we go to the movies to escape...

...Yet even this heroism, we realize, is not going to make any difference between him and Sally...

...Indeed, Lancaster gives the performance of his career...

...The next morning she's about to run out on him with money he made dealing cocaine that her husband (Robert Joy) had stolen from the hoods...

...Sarandon and Lancaster both rise to what their roles demand...

...Like the self-narration that is composed on the couch, the speeches in modern plays are ideally delivered in a monotone...

...He has never found a story that could win us over the way he wants...

...Malle has for years been casting about, trying to convince us that sheer personality, the merely human qualities of his characters, should overcome all our moral considerations...

...The result is that when two characters in this film have a conversation, they never quite connect...

...As she's half out the door, he reminds her that she should soon ditch the car they stole...

...This makes the relationships between them rather odd and wonderful, and it gives real events an inconsequentiality, an irrelevance almost, that is quite wonderful too...

...Each lives in a kind of solipsism that no one else can penetrate...

...They are the negation of acting just as the neuroses and psychoses they recite are a negation of feeling...

...This is what John Guare's script for Atlantic City gives him at last...

...The performance that they require has to be as precise and graceful as the toreador's lunge with his sword...

...Though they haven't admitted it to each other, they both know, vaguely, that she's skipping...

...Chrissy and Grace both live in their own, private dream worlds...

...Not the least of Atlantic City's charms, therefore, is that it provides us with a respite from this boredom and alienation...

...You saved my life," she answers irrelevantly, and leaves...

...Thus has he tried to make us sympathetic to a thief (Le Voleur), a mother who commits incest (Souffle au Coeur), a Nazi collaborator (Lacombe, Lucien), and the thralldom of a child prostitute (Pretty Baby...

...But this time, to no one's astonishment more than his own, Lou shoots the two hoods...

...Their relationships are based on vulnerabilities that are mutual, but not shared...

...Screen FLEURS DE NALLE ESCAPE INTO SOLIPSISM AT one POINT in Atlantic City, Grace (Kate Reid), the bitchy, invalid widow of a gangster, sings an old song to a gullible pregnant girl named Chrissy (Hollis McLaren...

...It turns the solipsism into a comedy of errors...

...It's not a situation in which Lou has performed well before...

...It's yet another conversation of non-sequiturs...

...When the small-time crook in it finally murders somebody, and the confused girl for whom he does it runs out on him, Malle gets the happy ending he has always been searching for...

...They are what the most classical modern tragedy and the most existential theater of the absurd have in common...

...The last time, he just stood by, averting his eyes, as the hood beat Sally up...

...Since the rules of analysis forbid a response on the analyst's part, they have had a killing effect on drama and comedy alike, both of which require human exchange...

...Afterwards Lou could only mumble over and over in self-reproach, "I didn't protect you," meanwhile leaving her to pick herself up from the sidewalk...

...Lou and Sally may not be characters as hard to understand as those in more serious modern works, but they are perhaps harder to enact...

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

...Situations in which characters talk at rather than to each other, as Lou and Sally do, are virtually the basis of modern drama...

...It has to land in just the right place-to be broad enough that both we and the other characters in the movie recognize its preposterousness, but not so broad that it loses its credibility as a self-delusion...

...From the plays of O'Neill and Beckett to the movies of Jean-Luc Godard, we constantly meet these characters who are incapable of communing with anyone except themselvescharacters whose conversations are not really dialogue at all, but alternating monologues...

...Atlantic City is a funny, touching film because it provides such escape...

...On the board-walk, in At - lantic City," the song says, life will be a "dream...

...Maybe director Louis Malle does, too...

...But until now he has remained an auteur in search of the right characters...

...He's so pleased with himself that he practically jumps up and down...

...So do Lou (Burt Lancaster) and Sally (Susan Sarandon...

...They are not the kind of characters whose motives are opaque to everyone, even themselves...

...Near the end of the film, for instance, Lqu and Sally are menaced by some hoods, one of whom goes after Sally with a knife...

...Where his dream is to retire to Florida with her as his mistress, hers is to deal her way to a glamorous life on the Riviera (she's been taking a course for croupiers...

...The source of this modern vision of life is, I suppose, the analyst's couch...

...She suggests wistfully that they could go to France instead...

...After killing the hoods, he asks her to come to Florida so he can'' show her off," as if that were a prospect that should appeal to her as much as it does to him...