Love-Sacred and Profane

...yet it is expressed much too abstractly, too theoretically...

...Especially the parents seem unduly petty and plodding...

...but what...

...The others, however, are deft, notably Berto, Marielle and Romand, and there is one winsome scene when that fine old character actor, Jean Tissier, in charming words and gentlest tones, extols the beauties of violent perversion...

...Head Comix lovers will relish this, too...

...do not help?unless intended as parody, which, clearly, they are not...

...Moreover, the cinematography by Paul Goldsmith, who almost certainly had to shoot this in 16 millimeters, emerges as unimpressive...

...and such feeble lines of his as "The music expresses life...

...This is the story of the sordid, low-life New York types who surround an innocent young cartoonist (Bakshi himself...

...nothing untoward happens...

...One good thing can be said for Barron right away: He does not make it easy for himself by inventing a blood feud between the families or giving one of the youngsters an incurable disease...

...Claude and Isabelle remain pure through temptations that might have fazed a St...

...Our chenouque (which might be French for schnook) is told by a successful friend to convert his operation into the eponymous le sex shop (which is franglais for a place that sells pornography, erotica and kinky sex gadgets) because "Proust or positions, a book's a book...

...With his excremental vision unearned by true despair and unrelieved by genuine wit, Bakshi becomes merely the Paul Morrissey of the cartoon film...

...he loves and plays classical music soulfully, but listens to rock while doing his homework...

...he studies hard and gets top grades, but is also a hell of a basketball player, and so on...

...It is not so much artistic as economical -Cheaper than drawing in the backgrounds...

...a great artist-Can it be often enough repeated?-makes his own rules, and gets away with murder, or incurable diseases, or the most extraordinary coincidences...

...a father who left a Detroit ad agency under a cloud is exonerated and recalled from his temporary job in New York to an even better one in Detroit-that is all...

...On the whole, the growing love between the kids is very well handled, but their relationship to the world and sense of themselves is rather less surely grasped...

...Still, what is Jeremy really about...

...Jeremy ought to fit the bill: It was made locally by the writer-director arthur Barron, who teaches film at Columbia and created quite a stir with his TV documentary on birth and death...

...But certainly moved...

...On Screen LOVE-SaCRED aND PROFaNE by john simon small films, inexpensively and independently made, have great appeal: One looks to them as a promising alternative to mass-produced mammoths from the big studios, especially when they do not come from the trendy, narcissistic, obscurantist underground cinema...

...anthony and a Brito-mart...

...Perfect...

...Either we should have seen how the kids live with and fight for their precocious, city-buffeted love, or the shock of parting should not have been delayed till nearly the end of the picture, so that its effects and aftereffects cannot be adequately explored...

...he is scared witless of making a date with Susan, yet a couple of weeks later makes flawless love to her...

...in any case, more black than humorous...

...These are two major and separate problems, and demand, each of them, pretty nearly full-scale attention...

...as you can guess, the movie deals with the basic problems and relationships of adolescence, one of the oldest topics going, and thus requiring a maximum of honesty, perspicacity and freshness of outlook...

...Is it about being a teenage boy and girl together in an era when high-school kids quite naturally have sexual intercourse...

...When Jeremy's more "experienced" classmate Ralphie (a bit of a stock character altogether) thinks there is nothing to asking the "older" girl out for a date, Jeremy remonstrates: "She probably expects me to be interesting," which rings wonderfully true and is nicely ironic to boot, Jeremy being so unusual...

...their lack of communication with their children would be much more gripping if it occurred inevitably, in spite of genuine sympathy, rather than as here, because of narrow-mindedness or self-absorption...

...Few jokes come to the rescue of this candied Candide and grisly Gris-elda, and even Berri's acting and personality are far from prepossessing...

...What it comes down to is that when you are dealing with such simple, elemental, prototypical subjects, you have to be absolutely, nail-on-the-head right, and Barron (or whoever-even the boy who plays Jeremy claims to have contributed two key scenes) misses too often...

...You are moved, though not, as in true art, illuminated and transfigured...

...I ask, is the point of cartoons when almost all they do could be performed as well or better by live actors...

...Heavy Traffic is clumsily put together and boring despite its relative shortness...

...The casting of Leonardo Cimino, a second-generation Italian and third-rate actor, is typical of a certain carelessness that informs this movie, for the bookshelves in the musician's apartment display Peter altenberg, Rilke's Rodin in German, Burn-shaw's The Hebrew Poem Itself, and other items denoting a first-generation austrian or German Jew, a type of displaced Central European intellectual whom the rather mafioso-like Cimino doesn't begin to suggest...

...But now take this exchange: "Susan: Someday I'll find out who I am...

...who, while trying to sort out his love-hate for them, ends up perishing in the asphalt jungle...

...Nevertheless, the film has its charming or moving scenes, not the least because the principals, Robby Benson and a newcomer, Glynnis O'Connor, are so natural, persuasive and winning...

...but Susan's father gets another job and takes his daughter back home with him...

...The fact that Joseph Brooks, who wrote one of the film's songs, claims to be a coauthor, need not detain us here...

...Otherwise, even if it manages to avoid the more obvious traps of the cliche, the sentimental and the maudlin, it is apt to collapse under the weight of all that competition from previous literature, drama and film...

...He agrees, and is soon adrift on a sea of erotic temptations provided by his sexiest clients, a swinging dentist (Jean-Pierre Marielle) and his sexually multivalent wife (Nathalie Delon), not to mention an adorable lesbian salesgirl (Beatrice Romand) he has hired...

...and, as Roger Green-spun correctly noted, the film is ultimately saved from the slickness it flirts with by the roughness and amateurishness it cannot quite escape...

...They become friends, then happy lovers...

...It may smack a little of a plot device, but does not strain our credulity unduly...

...Berri's own screenplay tells the story of Claude (played by Berri), a little Parisian bookstore-owner who is losing money on his business and cannot keep his cute wife Isabelle (Juliet Berto) and cute children in the cute style they are accustomed to...

...Such a one could have carried off Jeremy's, asymmetrically bipartite construction...

...Thus Jeremy invariably picks the winners in horse races but never actually bets (why, since he is infallible...

...I do not believe this...

...Do you know who you are??Jeremy: Sometimes...

...The film has been praised for its inclusion of live action and frequent use of photographed footage or film clips for backgrounds to the cartoon characters...

...The soundtrack, as in Fritz, is poor and hard to follow, and the recurrent motif of a live-action pinball player soon becomes exasperating...

...in view of all that straining after urban pastoral effects, this becomes quite a drawback...

...It may well be what the kids are thinking or, more precisely, feeling...

...The black humor of Fritz begins to look stale here...

...If, indeed, it believes anything...

...Barron, though, leaves us feeling slightly cheated...

...He is shy and bungling about getting to know this older girl, but his talent as a cellist and her interest in becoming a ballet dancer bring them together...

...Ralph Bakshi, who drew the not unamusing Fritz the Cat, has followed it up-or, rather, down?with another X-rated cartoon feature, Heavy Traffic...

...Heartbreak, and end of film...

...Or is it about the unsettledness of contemporary existence, whereby two adolescents who love each other sensitively and deeply, and might even grow into spouses, are suddenly and irrevocably torn asunder...

...Particularly unconvincing is the kindly, aging music teacher who gives Jeremy cello lessons...

...In the end, you do feel that categorical severance as strongly as, before, you felt the fumbling grace...

...The two songs are abominations ("Jeremy, your love for me/awakened the woman asleep in myself;/Now she is lost to you, to me . . ."), and there is altogether too much manipulativeness in the script...

...Jeremy is a New York high-school sophomore, artistically and intellectually inclined, who falls in love with a new girl at school: a junior and a transfer student from Detroit...

...We are, at some remove, reminded of Charlus, and fleetingly wonder whether the distance between Proust and positions might not, after all, be shorter than the film believes...

...Play it that way...

...but, in order to have it both ways, we are treated to fantasy sequences in the best Woody allen style, where sex is consummated titillatingly just off-camera, while in reality-berri's reality, that is...

...yet even Disney, in one way or another, has done this...

...You won't get anywhere near so much from Claude Berri's Le Sex Shop, a supposedly delightful little comedy that purports to celebrate the rewards of innocence and marital fidelity in a world of nasty sophisticates, sexual swingers and perverts...

...For example, when Susan's father is amazed at her taking their return home so badly, and remarks that she has hardly known this Jeremy, the girl, without a moment's hesitation, blurts out the exact number of weeks and days she has been seeing him...