Rose and director Robert Cary, both from theater backgrounds, co-wrote
this indie script as an homage to 1950s and early ’60s musical films like
“Funny Face” and “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Their tongues are inserted only
partway into their cheeks.

“Love” is shot in saturated washes that mimic period Technicolor. It uses
the Jimmy McHugh/Dorothy Fields title song and other cabaret standards as
nostalgic touchstones. The music also drives the heroine and, fitfully, the
movie itself.

Rose plays Billie Golden, a Queens waitress who dresses and dreams of
herself as a nightclub diva from a bygone era. The closest she’s gotten is a
gig at a gloomy airport cocktail lounge. Snipes from her widowed, alcoholic
mother (Alix Korey) add to her malaise.

Things look up when a high school heartthrob who got away (Cameron
Bancroft as lawyer Greg Ellenbogin) resurfaces. Superficially drawn to
Billie’s quirky individuality, Greg actually wants to remake her as a cookie-
cutter corporate wife.

Meanwhile, Billie keeps bumping into Elliot Shepard (the benign McCarthy),

a scruffy piano player who lives by his wits and lives for his art. Their
first encounters are unpleasant, but Billie has plainly met her intended soul
mate. She hires him as a piano teacher over the phone; fate makes them fall in
love over the keyboard in his whitewashed studio with the sweeping view.

The story is a propped-up triangle, with cute but callow Greg on one leg
and frowsy, soulful Elliot on the other. The dialogue features semi-droll
disconnects between Billie and everything around her.

When she tells Greg she’s in cabaret, he asks, “The show?” No, she
clarifies: “The genre.” Even Elliot dismisses her at first as “the Audrey
Hepburn wannabe.”

Rose’s well-judged performance lifts “Anything But Love” above mere retro-
contrivance. Instead of playing Billie as a failed or misunderstood artist out
of joint with the times, she gives the character a more winning obtuseness. As
she blunders through auditions in a tailored suit or dutifully does her hair
on giant rollers, Billie doesn’t fully comprehend herself. She’s not
consciously aping the past so much as living and singing in the only way she
knows how.

“I don’t even have a money note,” she tells Elliot. It’s not a plaintive
or pleading confession of her musical shortcomings. It’s just a fact … what
she has and what she doesn’t have to work with. That’s what Elliot sees in her
and Greg doesn’t, a genuine, guileless sweetness that knocks him off his feet.

When Elliot finally kisses her in the taxi, Billie collapses in honeyed
contentment. He keeps darting back into the frame for more.

Billie’s muted charm can carry things only so far. A nightmare jazz
ballet illustrating Billie’s future as a stylish wife labors hard for little
effect. Eartha Kitt turns in a generic, slightly creepy cameo as a singer who
stayed true to herself and didn’t let a man get in the way. The plot slowly
clatters to a proper conclusion.

“I don’t think we hear the same music,” Billie tells Greg. Since he was
romantically tone-deaf all along to her, she’s not telling him or the rest of
us anything that isn’t baldly self-evident.

“Anything But Love” mines its musical vein without quite knowing what to
do with it. The songs have a subtler, deeper glow than the film ever realizes.
Like Billie herself, it plays along gamely but remains a little dense.

Advisory: This film portrays sexual situations and contains some
suggestive language.

– Steven Winn

Comedy-drama from Argentina. With Carla Crespo, Tatiana Saphir, Veronica
Hassan, Beatriz Thibaudin. Directed by Diego Lerman. (Not rated. 94 minutes.
At the Opera Plaza Cinemas.).

A minimalist comedy of manners about a group of eccentric, marginalized
Argentines, Diego Lerman’s “Suddenly” begins as a kind of “Thelma & Louise”
filtered through Jim Jarmusch, then turns abruptly to head in an unexpected,
more serious direction.

It’s the work of a very young filmmaker (Lerman is in his late 20s),
promising if finally unsatisfying.

Marcia (Tatiana Saphir) is a heavyset and melancholy young woman from the
countryside who works in a Buenos Aires lingerie shop. After a chance
encounter, she is abducted by two punky, unsmiling young women, who call
themselves Mao (Carla Crespo) and Lenin (Veronica Hassan). Mao wants to have
sex with the victim, though she repeatedly denies that she and Lenin are
lesbians.

Though Marcia is clearly wary, and disclaims any attraction to Mao, some
part of her responds to the women’s attention and welcomes the departure from
her stupefying routine. The kidnapping, though involving an element of force,
at times seems more like an extended seduction attempt, as the rather grim Mao,

who’s given to long, piercing stares, declares her love for Marcia.

The three women wind up at the house of Lenin’s elderly aunt (Beatriz
Thibaudin), a lively oddball straight out of “Grey Gardens” who rents rooms to
a student and an artist. She is by far the film’s most appealing character,
with a sense of humor, a genteel dignity and an openness that suggests many
years of exploring unconventional avenues.

At the aunt’s house, the film takes a new, less certain tack. Marcia and
Mao finally come to terms with each other, Lenin’s harshness begins to wilt
under her aunt’s benevolence, Mao turns her attentions to the introverted
young male biology student. In short, relationships form, break up, deepen and
shift in various ways, but after a while you can’t help but wonder where all
this is going, if anywhere.

Part of the problem is in knowing how we’re to take Mao, who I think is
intended as a radically challenging figure, but whose relentless bullying of
Marcia, and attempts to dominate the proceedings generally, become an irritant
and a distraction. Lerman, who also wrote the script with Maria Meira, doesn’t
seem able to find the right register for the character.

The director’s view of these bohemian types isn’t entirely uncritical,
but you can’t help feeling he should have taken a harder look at them. The
film has nice black-and-white photography, and attitude to spare, but finally
leaves you with that unhappily familiar “so what?” feeling. Judging by
“Suddenly,” Lerman has potential; maybe his next film will have something more.

Advisory: Sexual situations and language make this film inappropriate for
children.

– Walter Addiego

Mystery. Directed by Claude Chabrol. Starring Nathalie Baye, Benoit
Magimel, Suzanne Flon, Bernard Le Coq. (Not rated. 104 min. At the Embarcadero.
).

Watching “The Flower of Evil” is like listening to a kind old great-uncle
telling a particularly ribald tale. You’ve heard this one before, and in an
edgier way — yet you still admire the old-fashioned storytelling.

Call it a casual murder-mystery, about a family secret in the shadowy
background of the matriarch’s run at a local political seat (the perfect
runoff film?); call it elegantly directed, and dig that French sophistication.
But it makes you wonder: what will be the legacy of Claude Chabrol?

He was once on the front lines with the New Wave directors — like
Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and the other New Wavers, he prepped for a
film career by being a critic for the famed Cahiers du Cinema magazine in the
1950s. His critical study of Alfred Hitchcock, co-written with Eric Rohmer and
published in 1957, predated Truffaut’s more famous interview book with the
director by 10 years.

Look at “Les Bonnes Femmes” (1960), a freewheeling yet somber adventure
about four young Parisiennes and their quest for excitement over a weekend,
and you see a young director intoxicated by filmmaking. Watch the wicked
“Merci Pour le Chocolat” (2000), the most recent Chabrol movie to hit San
Francisco, and now “Flower of Evil,” and it seems as if the master, now 73, is
only interested in amusing himself, with a self-assured style and loads of in-
jokes about the French bourgeoisie and their interfamily squabbles.

At least “Flower of Evil” — Chabrol’s 50th feature — provides an
interesting glimpse into local French politics. Veteran actress Nathalie Baye
is Anne, a mayoral candidate in Bordeaux. The film opens with Anne’s stepson,
Francois (Benoit Magimel), arriving after four years in America, and his
father distressed at Anne’s political ambitions. Francois is rather smitten by
his stepsister (and first cousin) Michele (Melanie Doutey).

Threatening Anne’s run at office is an 11th-hour revelation of past,
World War II-era family scandal — much the way the stories about Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s father, who was thought to have ties to the Nazis, were
rehashed before the recall election.

So there’s family scandal from two generations back; a political power
grab and extramarital affairs in the middle generation; and idealistic amour
fou in the present generation. That means when a dead body turns up,
everybody’s a suspect.

Chabrol’s examination of intergenerational guilt takes awhile to arrive
at the station, but the characters and dialogue — screenplay by Caroline
Eliacheff — are sophisticated and properly witty. It’s just regrettable
that Chabrol’s savage wit — razor sharp in his late-1960s classics “Les
Biches,” “La Femme Infidel” and “Le Boucher” — has dulled considerably.

Advisory: This film contains mild sexual situations and violence.

– G. Allen Johnson