'PRIVATE/PUBLIC' BREACHES BARRIERS OF STAGE, SCREEN.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Critic

Alain Resnais, the French director whose rigorous groundbreakers "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad" defined art cinema in its 1950s and '60s heyday, has taken to filming stage plays in his old age.

This hasn't produced fantastic results for a long time. But at 84, with Allan Ayckbourn's "Private Fears in Public Places," Resnais has come up with something pretty great again.

One of those contrived roundelays in which six characters with the most peripheral connections come closer into one another's orbits, "Private/Public" is both simple and sophisticated, lightly comic and deeply melancholy, stagey yet totally cinematic. It follows many a tried-and-true farce convention and sometimes borders on burlesque, but in the end it packs unique and mostly devastating emotional wallops.

That's because Resnais, Ayckbourn and the screenplay's French adapter, Jean-

Michel Ribes, treat their characters with a full measure of sympathy, no matter how rote or pathetic their actions may be. New, surprising dimensions appear in these lonely souls as they maneuver through a snowy week in Paris.

Their lives are all defined by some gnawing emptiness or another, but their concerns are life's enriching ones: work, faith, guilt, hope, regret, love of course, and the little perversions that keep so many going. The director celebrates these things and knows what they do to people, their potential and their limitations.

Recent Resnais regulars Andr(hrt) Dussollier and Sabine Az(hrt)ma are Thierry and Charlotte, who work together in an undertrafficked realty office. She's a cheery Christian who lends him videotapes of a religious music program that also contain some hidden striptease footage. Could the grinding beauty, whose face remains out of frame, be pious Charlotte? Thierry wonders; can't do much else but wonder, really.

He lives in a modern building with his much younger, attractive sister Gaelle (Isabelle Carre). She's in the habit of trying to meet men from lonely-hearts ads at a local bistro. They seem to always stand Gaelle up, and she's oddly resigned to this fate.

Charlotte moonlights as an in-home caregiver and this week is minding the bedridden, foul-mouthed father of Lionel (Pierre Arditi), the elegant, soulful bartender at a modernist hotel.

His best customer is Dan (Lambert Wilson), a career paratrooper who's been drummed out of the service for unclear -- but clearly unbecoming -- reasons. Dan is engaged to the hardworking Nicole (Laura Morante), who wishes he'd quit drinking all day and get a job, and is also hunting for a new, bigger apartment with the help of Thierry.

"Private/Public" unfolds in short, to-the-point scenes in a limited number of locations, most of which themselves are sectioned off by partitions, sculptures, drapery and the like.

These devices not only call attention to the piece's stage origins but serve to separate characters who already have a good deal of trouble connecting to someone else.

All the rest, obvious as they may sound, manifest rather subtly in the filmmaker's experienced hands. And the film really comes alive when people breach the barriers between them.

Which they do with heart-rening facility. Charlotte, for example, can make wonderfully inspiring cases for the practical application of her faith -- and when that doesn't work, she persuasively lets the devil inside her give it a go.

"Private Fears in Public Places" is a mature film in the best sense of the term. Resnais has no illusions about people -- there is a lot of French behaving badly here -- or the loneliness that may be most of our fates. But tolerance, forgiveness and hope are also high on his agenda. Primarily, he finds great joy in the fundamental mystery that is each individual personality.

"Private/Public" is not nearly as severe as "Marienbad," but it is just as vitally concerned with seeking out those unknowable places of the heart.

Bob Strauss [phone]

[e-mail]

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES - Three and one half stars

(Not rated: language, adult situations) Starring: Sabine Azema, Isabelle Carre, Laura Morante, Pierre Arditi, Andre Dussollier, Lambert Wilson.

Director: Alain Resnais.

Running time: 2 hr.

Playing: Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills; Edwards South Coast Village 3, Santa Ana.

In a nutshell: Six lonely souls' lives intersect during a wintry week in Paris in this playful yet deeply touching and insightful work from an old master. In French with English subtitles.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Andre Dussollier and Sabine Azema star as two of six lonely souls looking for connection during a snowy Paris winter in "Private Fears in Public Places."