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6The Daily Tar HeelTuesday, September 6, 1983 r The Gift' has few laughs, Fire strikes Carrboro apartments By STUART TONKLNSON Staff Writer not typical French comedy By STEVE CARR Staff Writer A lowly French bank clerk is about to retire from his job. But before he does, he must take one last business trip to Milan. It is on this trip that he receives his retire ment gift, a high-class call girl. This is the basis for the incredibly unfunny French film, The Gift. Someone should have given the clerk a watch instead. The distributor of this excruciating movie, Samuel Goldwyn, claims that the film "offers a wonderful combination of classic French farce at its whimsical best, and sophisticated Hollywood romance in the glorious tradition of the great romantic comedies of the '30s and '40s." As the Review French say, Boff! Still, such a claim, no matter how ridiculous or pretentious, must be disputed for the sake of the other films implicated. First of all, French farces are light. Fluf fy. Elegant. Their seemingly carefree ex terior, however, is only a mask to cover their darker undercurrents. Such great French films as Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game and Rene Clair's A Nous la Liberie are hilarious, fast, frenzied movies which deal in such darker issues as social strati fication and loss of identity in an indus trialized world. In some respects, The Gift does show resemblances to these films, but its attempts at comedy are so lame and ob vious that the darker issues take control of the film, making it more sour than sweet. In one of The Gift's best sequences, the French banker arranges with his wife to have a fake chance encounter aboard a train in order to save their failing marriage. However, their conversation becomes a prickly duel of lifetime failures and death wishes that give things a shocking Edward Albeesque quality a la Virginia Woolf. No matter how successfully carried out, such conversations have no place aboard a French farce, especially one that has no comedy to temper its bitterness. As for the comedies of the '30s and '40s, The Gift owes more to Three's Company than to Swing Time or Follow the Fleet. Again, there are some similarities but they are more obvious, and therefore more superficial, than the ones The Gift shares with the other French films. The clerk, Gregoire Dufour, loves the old Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies, and at one point he even gets to do a totally incon sistent and off-key number with his prosti tute, Barbara. But cross-eyed porters, lecherous old men, bespectacled nympho maniacs and people falling into canals do not seem to be included in the footage from those great old American films. Those films did not need to rely on people with bad backs to go crawling and slipping and tripping around to get laughs. The Gift owes more to the early Mack Sennet comedies and even those pre-'20s shorts have a considerably greater adroitness than the slapstick in The Gift. Perhaps the film itself isn't as bad if what it aspires to be is ignored. It is watch able, although the laughs are few and far between. There are even a few assets in fact, one major one: Clio Goldsmith. She is absolutely ravishing in the title role. Beauty like hers is destined to stardom, and it is hoped to better movies. The real gifts are the films which writer director Michel Lang pays homage to. Most of them are housed in the Under graduate Library's non-print section, where they await their well-deserved view ings. The major fault in The Gift is its reliance on people laughing as a plot resolution a dead giveaway to sloppy craftsmanship. ;r, s000?' ' I ' ' J?"', j f i ' I , ',4flf , H 'A I J Venice, the city of romance, is the setting for 'The Gift' starring international sensation Clio Goldsmith as Barbara, a very special gift. It also stars Pierre Mondy and Claudia Cardinale. Four Carrboro apartments were damaged Monday in an early evening fire. Carrboro Fire Chief Robert Swiger said that there was "medium damage" to the apartment where the fire began and slight damage to the other three apartments. Most of the damage was the result of the water used to put out the fire, he said. , He would not give any dollar estimate of the damages. The fire began in Apt. 116D of Bim Street Apartments at about 7 p.m. The apartment is being rented by three UNC graduate students. Although fire officials had not deter mined the cause of the fire late Monday, they were able to trace it to a utility room in one of the apartments. A resident of Apt. 1 16D said the fire began when an air conditioner short-circuited. The .three residents of the apartment said it was the second time they had used the air condi tioner since their return to school this fall. Gretchen Edelbrock, a resident of Apt. 116D and a graduate student in English, said she discovered the fire while washing dishes. After smelling smoke, she traced it to the air conditioner in the utility room, she said. Edelbrock and roommates Susan Ameel and Stephanie Lutz, both computer science graduate students, said they ex pected the smoke to cause most of the damage to the apartment. The fire never got out of control, Swiger said, and firemen were able to contain the flames within the first apartment. Firemen were able to leave the scene by 8:35 p.m. Residents received help from neighbors in carting valuables from the apartment after firemen doused it from the roof. The residents said they would be forced to stay with friends for a few days. BLOOM COUNTY by Berlie Breathed f VOU HPS? 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Daily Tar Heel (Chapel Hill, N.C.)
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Sept. 6, 1983, edition 1
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