MOVIE REVIEWS : Martin’s Enchanting L.A. : Goofily antic and helplessly romantic, ‘L.A. Story’ poses a real question--In a city that subsists on make-believe, how do you sort out real love from hype?

The new Steve Martin movie “L.A. Story” has a completely original spirit. It’s wiggy yet deeply, helplessly romantic. It’s a movie about infatuation--with women, with Los Angeles, with comedy. Mick Jackson, the Britisher who directed from Martin’s script, offers up a whirligig of familiar L.A. locales, but they’re transformed by the filmmakers’ ardor. The imagery has a spin to it, as if we too were being enswooned by it all.

Martin’s Harris K. Telemacher has been a TV weatherman for seven years and, in L.A., being a weatherman means being a clown. How else can you relieve the sameness of the nightly reports? Harris is miserable in his job--he even takes to pre-taping his predictions--but he also keys into the nuttiness that his producers expect from him. He’s a clown who won’t admit to being a clown. Offscreen, he does wacky, hare-brained things, like zipping his car across lawns and down concrete staircases to avoid rush-hour traffic, or skating unauthorized through the galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art while a friend points a videocamera at him.

But Harris is too “driven” to find any humor in these escapades. The museum stunt, for example, he calls “performance art.” In the film’s terms, Harris has the L.A. disease: He’s trying to pin down the whirligig and find true love, but the city’s pop nuttiness keeps getting in the way. Harris is frantic, all right, but he’s drifting in space, waiting for a signal to come down.

The signal comes in the form of a freeway sign’s digital readout. Throughout the movie, the sign’s traffic condition report periodically gives way to a series of gnomic, mystical messages about Harris’ impending love life. He’s captivated by Sara (Victoria Tennant), a reporter from the London Times newly arrived in L.A. to do a series on the city. But it takes him most of the movie to own up to the passion. Even when he wriggles free of a bad relationship with a martinet girlfriend (Marilu Henner), he finds himself frolicking with the stunning, air-brained salesgirl (the unquenchably frisky Sarah Jessica Parker) who fitted him for slacks.

The L.A. of this movie (citywide) is like an open-air fun-house. It’s an infatuated tableau, with no urban grunginess allowed to intrude upon the pop landscape of Tail o’ the Pups and Venice beach murals and New Wave bistros. It’s a landscape that would seem to be supremely hospitable to romance just because it’s so eye-popping and swoony.

And yet, despite the film’s antic, hallucinatory shimmer, there’s something heartfelt and substantial at its core. The filmmakers are posing a real question: In a city, a world, where everything is charged with make-believe, how do you sort out real love from infatuation and hype?

Steve Martin has often played characters--like the Depression-era dreamer in “Pennies From Heaven” or the fire-chief Cyrano in “Roxanne”--who are transfixed by their own ardent dreams. In “L.A. Story,” Martin is attempting to scrunch all of his comic personas into one. There are lickety-split visual and verbal references not only to those two films, but also to “The Jerk” and “All of Me” and “The Lonely Guy” and “The Man With Two Brains.” By placing L.A. at the center of his new movie, Martin is saying that the city encourages people to act out their own most eccentric selves. He lays out all of his own selves for us here, and, miraculously, they synthesize.

The film’s anything-goes scenario occasionally turns in on itself. There are wayward gags, like Sara’s penchant for tuba-playing, or a freeway shootout, that don’t quite work. And even the film’s freeway sign motif becomes wearying: It’s in the “2001” and “Field of Dreams” mode, and it’s too spooky-inspirational a conceit for this wingding. Even though Martin has written a beauty of a role for himself, my ideal Steve Martin movie would allow for a lot more of his physical comedy.

Victoria Tennant brings a patrician silliness to her role that matches up well with Martin’s bandy-legged finesse and rapt goofiness, but her role isn’t filled out enough. The romance between Harris and Sara is more successful on a visual than an emotional level. Their mutual entrancement is conveyed in a maelstrom of set-pieces, like the storm that closes the film, or the enchanted moment when they walk through a garden and suddenly become children.

The numerous jokes at the city’s expense, while affectionate, are not always of the first freshness. By concentrating on trendy L.A. high spots, the movie leaves itself open to charges of social indifference; it would have been an even more daring comedy if it had attempted to incorporate more urban and ethnic colors into its palette.

But, in general, “L.A. Story” is most successful when it’s taking risks--when it jettisons the earthquake gags and the New Age riffs and the freeway yocks and instead draws on the filmmakers’ flabbergasted awe at the L.A. fantasyland. “L.A. Story” (rated PG-13 for mild sexual situations) draws on the visual styles of David Hockney and, in the ripe, verdant lushness of that garden scene, the great 19th-Century French primitive Henri Rousseau. There’s a moment when flowers suddenly bloom and a stone lion turns his head that’s probably a nod to Cocteau’s “Beauty and the Beast.”

Very few comic artists would think to incorporate these kinds of references into their movies, and fewer still could do it without seeming pretentious. The reason it all works in “L.A. Story” is that Martin and Jackson are on the same sophisticatedly child-like wavelength as those artists. They are on the lookout to be enchanted. And it’s this ache for enchantment that unifies the film’s crazy-quilt of styles and moods. It’s a mystifyingly funny experience.