E-Mail This Article to a Friend COMME SI DE RIEN N’ÉTAIT/AS IF NOTHING HAD HAPPENED

Instead of on ice rinks and in Harvard Yard, this French Love Story takes place on the set of a Paris stage. Scatty theater director Thomas (Pierre-Olivier Mornas, who also wrote and directed the film), falls for Alix (Alice Carel, who resembles a fuller-cheeked Sissy Spacek) and casts her as the lead role in his play only to learn that she’s been diagnosed with a hereditary brain tumor. Alix doesn’t know he knows, and the film deals less with her disease than with the progress of the play and the pair’s giddy love for each other. Mornas just does sidestep maudlin over-sentimentality; the weepiest scenes take place primarily in rehearsal, and art and life do tend to blur there toward the end. But Alix feels half-drawn; she’s more a love-object actress than a living-dying woman. When she eventually explains to Thomas how her father died, he responds, "Let’s fuck. Let’s fuck." In the end, the show must go on, and it does, almost as if nothing had happened. In French with English subtitles. (97 minutes)