Modest Delights

...T * o some extent, though, Salter redeems himself with his Ida-hoans: David's taciturn hayseed father and his drugstore-cowgirl girlfriend, both convincing mixtures of pettiness and forthrightness, materialism and outspokenness...

...Most damaging of all, is the fact that the hero, despite good little touches, remains an ultimate blank...

...When the husband and lover speculate about why Helene passed it on to him, Victor suggests that maybe she just likes to have it around...

...Michel Bouquet is a remarkable actor...

...By slow, casual stages we find out what is lacking in this marriage, but also what modest strengths it does have...

...But he is not a very nice rube: He is out to win, come hell or icy slopes...

...Nevertheless, La Femme Infidele tends to be subtle and searching, and also accurate— as when Charles is delighted during his impromptu visit to his rival to be offered some bourbon and to consume, for once, the booze reserved for his wife...

...The best scene of the film, and one as good of its kind as you are likely to get, is the confrontation between husband and lover...

...So there is an obnoxious drunk or madman at a bistro counter grotesquely repeating everything that is said...

...she lies gravely composed like some latter-day gisant and, with an interval between them, emits two grisly little groans...

...he can exude the nervous overconcernedness of an aging and insecure husband for a young and remote wife, he can pour the sweat of anxiety into a look or intonation without losing his worthiness and likableness in our eyes...

...Chabrol knows how to handle his actors...

...in a posh nightclub an unknown beauty suddenly and sinis-terly reaches over to light Charles' cigarette—later, an inebriated man sits down in her seat and insults Charles for no reason...

...Yet the two things produce in us a fascinated exasperation, a yen to shake her by the shoulders, drown her in a magnum of Arpege, or just rape her on the nearest bearskin rug...

...Still, there is that marvelous civility between the spouses: rather formal, as one finds it in the French upper middle class, but comforting in its very ceremoniousness...

...He looks after all her bodily and some of her emotional needs, leaving her spiritual ones cavalierly alone...

...I do not wish to exalt the film beyond its due...

...Though Salter has done well with his Alpine chitchat and the minor skiers, especially with the strong, decent, inarticulate Coach of the American team, who—here comes the switch—is not very bright underneath, some characters remain unduly shadowy...

...or when, having a terrible time getting the dead body out of the trunk compartment of his car, Charles, rattled as he is, still takes his jacket off carefully and methodically folds it before resuming his agonizing task...

...Incensed to the point of insanity, Charles picks up a little reproduction of an Egyptian head (a Nefertiti, I think) that strangely resembles Helene's, and clubs Victor to death...

...But it doesn't...

...No matter...

...The fact is that she does have a cloudily abstracted stare that may well stem from myopia, and a languidly husky way of speaking that may easily be caused by adenoids...

...The world is full of champions, observes the skeptical father, harshly but not untruthfully...

...I love you like a madman," he says and goes to meet the policemen...

...Here dialogue, pacing, camera movement and acting merge into an experience that shuttles between humor and horror, relentlessly exploring the no man's land between comic absurdity and stupefying pain...

...a police inspector is continuously and preposterously playing with his nose while his colleague does all the questioning...

...The crazy or monstrous is shown as impinging on the everyday occurrences, coloring and distorting them, yet unable finally to vitiate something basic, enduring and brave about human life...

...There is an unusual scene in which little Michel accuses his parents of being stark mad, and the boy himself has a faintly sickly, neurotic cast about him while remaining a believable enough boy in Stephane Di Napoli's intelligently uncute performance...

...The last part of the film concerns the effect of this murder on the couple and their child, how the police start closing in (though their methods are left vague), how Helene discovers what happened and takes it as the supreme token of love...

...Chappelet is a rube from Colorado Springs, Idaho...

...mostly, though, he is no different from the rest of us, except perhaps nicer...

...There is the first-rate action photography, capturing Olympic champions burning up some of Europe's most photogenic slopes...

...Downhill Racer does not get beyond the level of competent, intelligent entertainment, but of how many recent American films can one say even that much...

...Michael Ritchie has directed these sequences skillfully, with the right proportion of cutting, crosscutting, and tracking...

...I love you," says Helene, kissing his palm...

...Finally, it is the ridiculous that proves hardest to bear: A giant Zippo lighter Charles gave Helene for their third anniversary now graces Victor's bedside table...

...This corresponds to Charles' car pulling up to the curb from left to right, so that the optical effect taking place inside the house and involving Helene repeats an actual movement outside the house and involving Charles...

...The interiors are better...

...He makes the lover into a refreshing combination of a moderately wealthy, callous playboy-dilettante and a good provider for his divorced wife and fond father to their two children...

...When Charles is led away, he may have lost his life, but he has gained his wife's love...

...Charles tries to be worldy and nonchalant while agony hangs out of his eyes...

...they are, however, unattractive for different reasons, such as the vast stretches of mauve wall in the married couple's bedroom...

...A curious thing, when you consider that Salter, in his other films and fiction, specializes in European characters and settings...

...Carole Stahl, the fascinating, shallow, sexy champ-follower, who likes to make the winners tumble into her bed...

...Roger Greenspun, in the Times, was prompted to write: "She controls a sense of social parody so sustained that her simple 'Bon-jour' becomes a major critique of French language and civilization...

...Alcohol, tv, nightclubs are shown as somewhat pathetic substitutes for passion...

...And they are revealed with a swiftness and economy that avoids seeming rigged up...

...More could have been done with this, too, but one is grateful for what there is of it...

...T M. hrouohout the film, the camera does excellent things...

...And that is what the film is about: an otherwise ordinary man's madness, real madness, in his love...

...and if David uses his small-town girlfriend for quick soulless sex, he is repaid in kind by the cosmopolitan but fickle Carole...

...Charles' love is not virile enough for Helene, yet it is full of touching solicitude, which she duly appreciates...

...I have not read the Oakley Hill novel from which the film was made, but a glance at the book tells me that Salter has wrought enormous changes...

...Here the suggestion is one of husband and wife united at least in their shared guilt and anxiety...

...When Charles first comes home fully aware that he is being cuckolded, the camera lingers on a large African antelope mask hanging on the wall and displaying huge horns...

...Much of this color cinematography was done from skis chasing after the champions at 60 m.p.h...

...there is enough else to enjoy in Downhill Racer...

...Stephane Audran, as Helene, floats through it all like a bored but not discontented fish in an affluent aquarium...

...A film of similarly understated, lower-case virtues is Downhill Racer...

...But, in contradistinction to other Chabrol films, this one has a very effective musical score by Pierre Jansen, modernistic in an unobtrusive way, and scored, I believe, mostly for cello and piano, and sometimes for piano solo...

...It is intended as a minor work, and resolutely minor it remains...

...Distracting, too, is the dreary music, but in later action sequences it luckily leaves the skiers alone, to do their work unserenaded...

...Helene slowly reclines on her opulent bed, her feet remaining stiffly on the floor...

...But the French language and civilization would, in any case, remain inviolate...

...He has gone inside the darkening house and watches through the window as Helene approaches...

...The best thing he has done, bespeaking the professional novelist in him, is to have made the dialogue not just clipped and tough but also artistically telling...

...The camera closes in on the taut, anxious back of his head, while Helene's approach is seen distantly, out of focus...

...The people here speak a kind of Hemingway of the slopes, which, however, does not lapse into parody...

...it moves around quite ebulliently but, in contrast to previous Chabrol movies, its trips seem necessary or at least pleasurable rather than merely ostentatious...

...Still, the role has its severe limitations, and Redford, at any rate, is one of the most valuable young players of our cinema, in international as well as national competition...

...It is of a genre that I usually have little love for, the big sports competition story, with the ruthless-ness of the game serving as a frame for the toughness of the competitor-protagonist, or, in an alternative schema, getting the innocent hero foully framed...

...Even the greatest love gift, murder, cannot bring these spouses together...

...The music sounds more and more frantic...

...Then the camera moves in for a close-up to catch a last, stricken moan...

...Moreover, Chabrol is, as usual, overstressing his notion of the encroachments of the bizarre...

...That inoffensive, conciliatory remark is most hurtful of all: Does Victor consider Helene, whom Charles worships, just someone to have around...

...This in-betweenness is both good and bad...

...Out of beleaguered love, this man could do insane things...

...the very town is a happy choice: Idaho aspiring to the Olympian heights of Colorado...

...even the fussily overdecorated suburban home is not without its pathos...

...the blurred Helene keeps coming nearer and nearer— the next frame should bring her into focus...

...Does Helene think of herself as more around Victor than around Charles, so that a favorite knicknack must migrate to an adulterous bedside...

...There was a chance here to create a truly interesting complex character—complex, that is, within his simplicity—but James Salter, the scenarist, has seized only one half of the opportunity...

...But let us get to the principal virtues of the film: its ability to tell a great deal through suggestion, and its evocative blending of the ordinary and the extraordinary...

...There is something quietly manly even about his weakness, and the childish pitifulness in his worried gaze is never allowed to become ludicrous or mawkish...

...Another time it is Helene at the window, uneasily awaiting her husband's return after her first encounter with the police...

...Eventually Victor, the lover, enters the scene, and he is brilliantly portrayed by that extraordinary actor, Maurice Ronet...

...Even when the music becomes highly dramatic, the sparseness of melody and Spartan instrumentation keep it from turning hammy...

...In a boudoir scene with Helene, he is a superb mixture of courtesy and thickskin-nedness, attentiveness and unroman-tic casualness...

...Whereas Carol Carle is perfect as the gum-chewer from Idaho, Camilla Sparv is inept as the international playgirl—her very German is inexcusable, even from a Swiss, which she is supposed to be...

...The dialogue among skiers, their camaraderie and rivalries, are, I repeat, well managed, and so too are scenes in which the Coach, persuasively played by the dependable Gene Hackman, struggles to convince American business interests to subsidize this amateur sport despite the un-American fact that it is neither baseball nor football...

...We learn much about them both as a group and as individuals through overtones and implications, and the way Helene's infidelity is hinted at to the audience while remaining hidden from Charles is simple and effective...

...The pair provides some justification for Chappelet's need to claw his way out of his milieu, and, at the same time, make for a poetic justice running through the film...

...and Ma-chet, her somewhat shady boss, a ski manufacturer whose mistress she may or may not be—these characters are not seen fully and enlight-eningly...

...Instead, the music breaks off in sour cacophony like a record running down, and the image on the screen fades away...

...Yet he is doing it for fame rather than money, for some self-serving notion of gamesmanship rather than pure greed...

...We open with a family scene: Charles, Helene, their son Michel, and Charles' mother sitting at a garden table and looking at old photographs...

...There are bravura moments...

...I love you," says Charles, his look intensifying the weak words ad infinitum...

...We get a lateral wipe that spreads across the screen from left to right, catching as it progresses the vertical staves of the window frame...

...The colors (and I doubt that it is merely a matter of the particular print) are so pale and deliquescent in the exteriors that you expect them to start running into one another...

...Best of all, he can suggest a fanaticism that would stop at nothing and also a pervasive gentleness...

...Thus he realizes, at least unconsciously, that his wife is not much of an actress, and he stages the scene in which Helene believes her lover has betrayed her (though he has merely been killed) for maximum efficacy without the prerequisite of genuine histrionic ability...

...There is something peculiar about the opening sequence, though, which smacks of front-office interference and does not make very good sense...

...One would like to know, if that is true, what Greenspun's idea of a minor critique of French language and civilization might be—the nov-elistic work of Marcel Proust, perhaps...

...It is ineffably sad that the handsome Ronet should have gone physically to seed, but his acting is as good as ever, or better...

...Still worse is her performance, typical of a high-fashion model turned actress: zero in all departments except clothes-horsing around...

...Then, gradually, and believably, we are shown Charles' awakening suspicions...

...And the beauty of it is that in this film, for the first time, it does not just look easy and graceful, but graceful and grueling...

...Robert Redford, who had to fight to get this film produced at all, deserves more credit for that than for his performance, which is good but not up to his best...

...Moreover, Michael Ritchie makes one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in many a snowy season...

...They are horrible in their provincialism, yet imbued with a directness and soundness the Europeans lack—a Jamesian motif, as it were...

...Victor tries to be sophisticatedly amicable but manages repeatedly to put his foot in Charles' entrails...

...In this case, the sport is more elegant: Olympic skiing in glittering European locations— Swiss, French, Austrian—and the hero, David Chapellet, is neither a Galahad-like greenhorn nor a hardened professional out for the money, but something in between...

...Thus when, having returned from the murder, Charles finds his wife in the midst of a kiddies' party on the front lawn...

...Michel is a real kid— not too attractive, bright but not clever, and a trifle spindly as one somehow expects the child of a much older father to be...