Screen:

...The slaps don't work: the girl falls in love with Pierre-Alain...

...Why did Malle want his characters to hit the road...

...Pierre-Alain is as idealistic a goof as Trofimov...

...Examples: Milou sincerely mourns his mother's passing but that doesn't keep him from trying to grope his pretty housekeeper-mistress while the corpse lies in the next room...

...richard alleva" richard alleva...

...In the French countryside, in May 1968, a very old woman dies in her large, rambling, somewhat moth-eaten house...

...But would he who agitated alongside other students with backgrounds just as bourgeois as his own really accept so readily the notion that his former pals are prepared to string up all the children of the middle class...

...Funerals-like weddings, birthday parties, Christmas gatherings, etc.-provide effective frameworks for dramas...

...First, the comic flight into the countryside cools the movie off just when the self-loathing of Claire threatens to heat it up, in fact, threatens to over-heat it...

...Yet, because May Fools is so convincingly evocative of the France of 1968, these parallels only hit us after the movie is over...

...None of these scenes shock as the killings in Malle's Lacombe Lucien or the incest in Murmur of the Heart...

...The shocks this film delivers are minor, fleeting ones...

...his orphaned niece Claire, an antiques dealer with a lesbian lover in tow...

...By sending Milou and kin down another country road, perhaps Carriere was harking back, consciously or not, to his earlier work for Bunuel...

...And the easy-goingness that is May Fools' most attractive quality turns out to be also its main limitation...

...Making it may have been a sort of working vacation for its director...

...But the conceit that worked for the Spanish magician doesn't serve as well for the French realist...

...But Malle and his scenarist, Jean-Claude Caniere, don't use their funeral framework in a mechanical way...

...They are nevertheless jolting enough to keep us sitting up straight...

...In fact, the better parts of May Fools never seem derivative because Chekhov's good influence has been absorbed...

...And it is also at this point that the movie goes off the rails...

...Malle, having employed so much screen time making his characters solid and complex, now must try to make them serve as allegorical figures as well...

...I think that there may have been two reasons...

...Malle may have realized, mid-production, that Claire's rage and its consequences, though fascinating, were proving too disturbing for a movie that he intended as mild, relaxed, sunny fare...

...But another function, more to the director's essential purpose, is served by the funeral...

...It doesn't work...

...After the exposition is over, the characters are then free to make passes and hurl whisky bottles, exchange confidences and insults, dredge up ancient stories and bury equally ancient hatchets...

...The Chekhovian source is patent: If Milou is a Gallicized Gaev (or Ranevskaya), then the resentful, money-minded Claire is a feminine Lopakhin...

...Unable to inter the corpse with due ceremony because the student strike has paralyzed the undertaking business along with everything else in the country, the body lies in state as Milou and kin proceed to enjoy good food, fine weather, and one another's company...

...But when Malle tries to emulate the strategies of an artist who is as alien to him as Bunuel, we feel like crying, "Workman, stick to your lathe...

...Rather improbably, everyone in the funeral party believes this report and, most improbably, the young revolutionary Pierre-Alain starts to fear for his own skin, too...

...inspired by reports of the Parisian students' street bacchanalias, the entire funeral party drunkenly carouses through the room containing the casket while the family cat, as conservative as any animal must be, hisses its disapproval of the commotion...

...An unwritten but firm code of conduct is due the rites of death, and when these May fools transgress this code-and, being Malle creatures, they will transgress-characteristic Ma&efrissons are produced...

...They bring together relatives who haven't seen each other in years and who then fill each other in while preparing meals, downing drinks, dressing corpses, decorating Christmas trees, etc...

...It's too richly textured to be com- pletely forgettable, yet too diffuse to sear itself into your thoughts...

...She is immolating herself...

...It is not her lesbianism that shocks, but the resentment that ceaselessly smolders within her...

...Information about their pasts is conveyed loosely, casually, as much by gesture and glance as by words...

...and, after a long delay, the correspondent's alienated son, Pierre-Alain, who is aflame with the idealism of the student revolution in which he has just been participating in Paris...

...In a recent radio interview, Malle said that one of his inspirations for May Fools was a performace by Piccoli as Gaev in The Cherry Orchard...

...But expedience to what end...

...And so, when the funeral party grows randy as well as noisy, Claire proposes orgy and offers herself not to any man in the room but to the one who must most repel her, the student's truck-driving pal, Grimaldi, a neanderthal...

...She isn't doing this just to make her straying lover jealous...

...Second, Malle's scenarist, Carriere, once wrote an excellent satirical fantasy for Bunuel, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, which portrayed monstrous paragons of the middle class in a manner that was one part Simenon and three parts Lewis Carroll...

...From diverse parts come his much-married foreign correspondent brother with his English wife...

...The one deeply distrubing element in May Fools is the character of the niece, Claire, played with bottled-up fury by Dominique Blanc...

...As she starts to disrobe, Claire has a tight, terrifying smile on her face...

...his daughter (Miou-Miou), accurately described by Terrence Rafferty (in the New Yorker) as a "savagely uptight bourgeoise," with her husband and children...

...Some panicked wealthy neighbors burst in with an ill-founded rumor: the student revolutionaries are rampaging throughout the country, doing violence to any prosperous-looking person they encounter...

...Her sixtyish widower son, Milou (Michel Piccoli), calls his clan home for the funeral...

...That he does believe it, and that he does flee with all his relatives into the countryside, smacks of plot expedience...

...It's at this point that May Fools takes on a surprising turbulence and psychological power...

...a politically hip priest, reading prayers over the corpse, sidles over to a radio broadcasting news about the Paris strike, and turns up the volume...

...A recurring motif was a series of shots showing the main characters puffing away in formal dining clothes while trudging down an endless country road...

...This is a holiday movie, drenched in country sunshine...

...and the overworked family retainer recalls the ancient Firs...

...Milou, keeping vigil beside the body, sees his granddaughter bending over the corpse and, watching her short skirt creeping up, can't help ogling her (but when a priapic truckdriver remarks on the girl's blossoming nubility, the old landowning satyr puts the man of the road in his place with an icy stare...

...Her parents having been killed in an auto accident, Claire was raised by her grandmother who emotionally hobbled her, an upbringing that produced a woman who cannot forgive, who can barely smile, who plays the piano in a fury (Claude Debussy's General Lavinel), who must control every situation, who slaps her ditzy ballerina-lover around every time the girl gives a man a smile...

...A funeral sets the plot in motion...

...The characters are fairly tame, occasionally messy, mainly friendly animals...

...They follow their instincts, but their rule-breaking is kept within the family...