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Actor Cassel, 27, is easily the funniest Frenchman seen on screen since Jacques (Mr. Hulot's Holiday] Tati; and The Love Game, the first New Wave comedy released in the U.S., is a happy, bawdy but somehow innocent and always violently spontaneous little pa ama party. "What you do," the heroine informs the hero thoughtfully, "you do well. But—not seriously." Morbleu! he wonders. What more does the girl want? "A baby." The hero pales at the thought of marriage and fatherhood. "Fill your needs elsewhere," he proclaims indignantly. She finds a rival (Jean-Louis Maury) and gets engaged—but the rival gets cold feet, and at the fade hero tenderly promises heroine that some day, surrounded by all the children her heart desires, she may even have a wedding. Fin.
In such a fribble, treatment is everything, and the man responsible for that is Director Philippe de Broca. who never before made a movie on his own and now emerges as the biggest comic talent of the new school of Gallic cinema. Considering his youth and inexperience, De Broca's technique is startlingly mature. He has a frenzied flair for sight and prop gags, but he never lets them disturb the deeper humor of the scene—many moviegoers may for instance fail to observe that the painter-hero cleans his brushes on, of all things, an old black bra.
For De Broca, the comedy that counts is the comedy of character, and in Cassel he has found a richly responsive instrument to play on: a comedian who, like Chaplin or Marie Dressier, is more an actor than a performer. And through the character Cassel creates—a ludicrous but lovable mixture of Don Juan and Peter Pan—the moviemaker says something subtle and gently ironic about the character of urban youth in modern France. But at the core of his comedy, in scenes that hop, skip and jump like almost nothing since Rene Clair's great comedies (The Million, The Italian Straw Hat), De Broca makes a gay and warm and generous point about life itself: live it while you've got it because you only get it once.