MOVIE REVIEW : Reading Between the Lines of ‘La Lectrice’

“Reading is fine,” says the police inspector in “La Lectrice” (the Music Hall), “but look where it leads.” In Michel Deville’s arch and exhaustingly clever film it leads a reader-for-hire, the exquisitely droll Miou-Miou, into playing teacher, parent, sex-therapist and revolutionary, all at a reader’s wages.

Considering the passions that reading can unleash, “La Lectrice” (The Reader) is without a trace of any passion, especially one for movie making. A series of boxes within boxes, stories within stories, it begins in bed, as Constance (Miou-Miou) begins reading a novel to her work-obsessed lover Jean (Christian Ruche). But lest anyone become aroused by that setting, Deville makes the high, intellectual level of his intentions stultifyingly clear from the beginning.

The novel she reads is Raymond Jean’s “La Lectrice,” the story of Marie, who, like Constance, lives in Arles and decides one day to capitalize on her passion for literature by hiring herself out as a professional reader. As she begins, Constance becomes Marie, who goes about the depopulated city streets with a springy walk, wearing a series of perky, multicolored knit hats, perhaps to underline her playful nature.

Her first client is 14-year-old Eric, in a wheelchair as he recovers from a serious accident. He wants the poetry of Baudelaire, the stories of De Maupassant. When he also gets the inch of thigh showing between Marie’s black cotton stockings and her skirt, the erotic intensity of the moment propels Eric into a seizure. It does not, however, end things between Marie and Eric or even between Marie and Eric’s mother, who knits her a bed jacket.

Next is the nearly blind widow of a Hungarian general who gets a “marvelous text on precious metals” by Karl Marx, among other political subjects. (She’s played by Maria Casares, that great icon from Cocteau’s “Orpheus.”) Later, it’s a flustered and sexually stunted businessman, whom the eternally obliging Marie obliges with a bit of Marguerite Duras’ “The Lover,” never losing her place even when seated atop her client in her underwear.

Deville, who a few years ago gave us the suffocatingly precious “Peril,” a mystery-romance in which the actress Anemone affected a cane and a mock limp as a sort of frisson , outdoes himself here with his whimsies. “La Lectrice” (rated R for sexual situations and texts) is a movie that almost hugs itself with self-congratulation at its literacy. Mostly, that comes from elaborate film and literary references.

Thus Bella, the widow’s maid, who believes that spiders are attacking her, is a reference to Jorge Luis Borges and Manuel Puig: Borges because his story “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” was the basis for Bertolucci’s “The Spider’s Strategem”; Puig for “The Kiss of the Spider Woman.”

Lose anyone yet? It’s possible that the average or even the superior moviegoer might not catch this cunning insider tidbit. Reviewers have it a little easier; it’s laid out for us in the press kit. Some of the rest of the jokes are simpler, like the results when Marie reads “Alice in Wonderland” to the precocious 6-year-old Coralie.

The problem with “La Lectrice” is that it’s an entire film based on conceits like this, and, amusing as a few of them are, not long into the film they begin to pall. Then there is the distaste factor, whose very existence might astound the French. Presumably, we are men and women of the world, so why should the sight of a lovely young woman obediently giving each client exactly what he needs, sex, a groping feel, a look at her seminaked body--because he has employed her as a reader--strike us as soulless, even outrageous, rather than a comment on Marie’s sweet earnestness? Perhaps because watching impersonal sex is entirely different from reading about it.

Besides, isn’t Deville working against himself? Reading should inspire, seize, arouse its audience, especially the person reading. Where’s the fun in the passionless reader? Not in “La Lectrice,” you can be sure.