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Audiences around the world either love Claude Lelouch or hate him, and his latest cosmopolitan romantic thriller will surely keep the lines of division intact. And Now . . . Ladies and Gentlemen is an audacious riff on the French director’s most famous film, 1966’s Un homme et une femme, not just for the variation on the title but for the echo of the French classic’s famous "ba da da dada-dada-da dada-da" theme, which is sung here by French chanteuse and leading lady Patricia Kaas. She plays jazz singer Jane Lester, who flees Paris for Morocco in search of voodoo healing for a brain disorder and to sing in a piano bar. Jeremy Irons is the British gentleman jewel thief Valentin Valentin, who escapes to Morocco via sailboat (extreme sailing is to this film what auto racing was to Un homme et une femme); it turns out he’s suffering from amnesia. The contrived set-up — emotionally battered amnesiacs in love and the juxtaposition of Valentin’s debonair criminal persona with Jane’s sultry stage one — works only if you allow Lelouch to seduce you with his sumptuous globetrotting settings, his infatuation with the romantic travails of middle-aged adults, and his indulgent but irresistible nods to French cinema and music, from his own film’s score to legends Jacques Brel and Michel Legrand. In French, English, Arabic, and Italian with English subtitles. (133 minutes)
BY LOREN KING
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