The plot is a complex web of deceit and duplicity, with Jean-Louis Trintignant outstanding in his deadpan portrayal as a stuffy, fictitious president of France who now is interested only in presitge. He has lost his energy, his values, his ideals - all of which are telegraphed by his cruelly complacent attitude toward his wife (Claude Winter).
Ten years earlier when his mistress (Catherine Deneuve) refused to abort their unborn child, Trintignant wrote an incriminating letter to her breaking off their affair. She kept the letter, in her handbag - until a purse- snatcher (Hippolyte Girardot, son of Annie Girardot) came along one day. As the thief is rather cozy with a radical newspaper man (Michel Auclair), all of France now may find out just how dastardly its president is.
Screenwriter Francoise Giroud, who has based her script on her own experiences as a minister in the cabinet of former French president Valery Giscard D'Estaing, has three parallel stories working here - about the president's position, about the former mistress and her son, and about the homosexual link between the thief and the newsman - and she mixes all three quite credibly.
Her dialogue is sharp, particularly in the scathing monologue that she's written for Winter, and in Catherine Deneuve she has a leading lady in the perfect Alfred Hitchcock mold - cool, guarded, yet brave. (The film is very much in the style of Hitchcock's "Topaz.")
"Le Bon Plaisir" is uncommonly good.
Also showing: "L'Africain" ("The African"/being screened on Sunday, Feb. 2). This big-budgeted, wide-screen Philippe de Broca adventure-comedy pretty much lives up to my expectations as a Gallic variation on "Romancing the Stone," with Catherine Deneuve standing in for Kathleen Turner and Philippe Noiret in the rumpled Michael Douglas role.
She's a Club Med executive and he's her estranged husband who now is holed up in Africa for peace and quiet. While there, he's become somewhat of an animal activist and conservationist and, therefore, he resents her plans to ship in tourists.
Jean Benguigui has the Danny de Vito role, that of an exploiter out to ''rape the land," who sets all sorts of adventures in motion.
Also: "Tout Feu, Tout Flamme" ("All Fired Up"/ being screened tonight only). If "Le Bon Plaisir" is the best film I've seen, then this Jean-Paul Rappeneau is the worst one in the festival. It is one of those cloying domestic comedies with Yves Montand as a wayward father who tries to insinuate
himself back in the life of his no-nonsense daughter (Isabelle Adjani) after years of being absent.
IF YOU GO
All showings are scheduled at 2, 4, 6, 8 and 10 p.m. For further information, call 922-1011.
