He has yet another date with destiny

New York —  Claude Lelouch has made more than 40 feature films, yet the 65-year-old French director will be the first to admit that a movie he shot 37 years ago is still his most famous. “A Man and a Woman,” the 1966 feature that has come to define chic European romanticism, was an enormous international hit that tied for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival and won Oscars for best screenplay and foreign-language film. Yet the fact that it continues to overshadow Lelouch’s subsequent work (“And Now My Love,” “Happy New Year,” “Live for Life”) does not seem to faze him a bit.

“I love the film,” said Lelouch, who was in New York to promote his latest romantic opus, “And Now Ladies & Gentlemen,” which opens Friday. “It opened the doors of freedom for me,” he added, speaking through a translator, “and thanks to that film, I was able to make [many] other films. So I could never criticize it. Fortunately, since then I’ve made a lot of films of which I’m very proud.”

Lelouch said this while seated on a plush couch in a grandiose, 3,000-square-foot suite in the Waldorf Towers, a quieter, more exclusive adjunct of the famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. He is a medium-sized man who dresses casually but expensively and looks quite trim and healthy. On an extremely humid day, Lelouch was even wearing a sweater, casually draped around his neck. He has a lively sense of humor but also a touch of intellectual pretension, most obvious when he refers to his work and how it deals with the “perfumes of reality.”

Although Lelouch’s films have occasionally been excoriated by critics for their overly glossy visuals and glib story lines, the writer-director is definitely an auteur with his own style and concerns. Foremost among these is a belief in destiny, that lovers are fated to meet. This plays out in “And Now Ladies & Gentlemen” with the stories of Valentin (Jeremy Irons), a thief running from the law who washes ashore in Morocco, and Jane (French chanteuse Patricia Kaas, in her film debut), a lounge singer at a hotel in the city of Fez. This being a Lelouch film, they will meet, and connect, in strange ways.

“All my life I have been fascinated by meetings,” Lelouch said. “Initially, I was amazed that my mother and father met each other. They never got along, and they argued with each other throughout their lives. I tried to understand that my whole life, and perhaps the reason they met was to have me and my sister. So destiny is an essential idea in my work. I believe we are governed by mathematics. I don’t believe in chance or in coincidence.”

Lelouch also does not believe in adapting other people’s work. He has written or co-written every one of his films, all of which he claims are based on “stories in which I’ve either been a witness or a part of. I’ve never completely invented a story. I can’t make a film unless I’ve been inspired by reality. I have to believe in the story I’m telling.”

So Irons’ character, who decides at one point that he is going to pay back everyone he has ever robbed, is based on a real Englishman who returned some money he had stolen from Lelouch. And Kaas’ role has its genesis in a piano bar singer the director met while he was making a film in Zimbabwe.

“Every night after shooting I would go have a drink in the hotel bar,” he said. “There was a woman who was singing in the bar, and nobody was listening to her. I was fascinated to see this woman, who was very beautiful and sang very well, totally ignored. I asked her, ‘What are you doing here? A woman like you should be on the most important stages of the world.’ And she said, ‘I have no memory. When I sing, I have memory lapses. In a piano bar I can put the words in front of me.’ I found this story amazing, and it’s based on that I created the character for Patricia.”

It’s easy to see why Lelouch cast Irons in the film -- he is a fine actor, internationally known and a perfect romantic lead who, says the director, “resembles the real Valentin physically.” But Kaas, who is unknown in this country, was chosen for a very specific quality. “I was looking for a melancholic actress,” Lelouch said. “It’s very hard to play melancholy, because it’s something that’s constant and permanent. Melancholy people are never really happy or really sad. This is how she is in life. Every time I saw her on TV or on the stage, I would ask myself, ‘Why is she so melancholy?’ And melancholy is something that is very difficult to film.”

Tragedy, not melancholy, is at the root of Lelouch’s contribution to “September 11,” an omnibus feature in which 11 international directors were asked to make short films describing their reactions to the World Trade Center tragedy. The film opens in Los Angeles in October. Lelouch’s contribution is a two-character playlet set in New York involving a French deaf mute who is breaking up with her boyfriend, a tour guide who leaves for the twin towers on the morning of the disaster. As she writes a “Dear John” letter on her computer, the catastrophe unfolds on a TV screen in the next room, but she cannot hear it. It is only when her soot-covered boyfriend returns to their apartment that she realizes what has happened. And the duo reconciles.

Lelouch said he chose this story line because Sept. 11 “was such a worldwide media event, I asked myself, was there one person who didn’t know what was happening? And I found a deaf mute. It’s true that on that day, if you were deaf, you could have lived the day without knowing what was happening.”

Although his work is suffused with romanticism, it’s hard to describe Lelouch as a romantic. He said he is fascinated by love stories because “there are no love stories that end happily.” And even though he believes “love is what enables men and women to progress,” Lelouch also feels love stories are “like sports competitions. You never know whether you’ll be the winner or sixth in the finals. It’s a succession of eliminations, and each time you’re eliminated, there’s nothing worse than that.”

As with his feelings about love, however, Lelouch continues to make movies “because I want to progress. I like to continue making films because all of my films so far have been OK. If one day I had a feeling that a film had been a total and complete success, then I’d stop making films.”