Elegant movie actresses took care that overexposure did not stale their infinite variety, so their beauty remains unwithered, fresh to memory. Audrey Hepburn and Dana Wynter, Anna Magnani, Irene Papas and Julie Christie, Mary Astor, Claire Bloom. And Anouk Aimée, watching her man's car circle and figure-eight beach sands in that defining date movie, A Man and a Woman. It's not her fault the magic wasn't there 20 Years Later. In Live for Life Claude Lelouche had already shown that his métier would not enlarge beyond what scoffers dismissed as commercial schmaltz, corny music, glossy romance enhanced by beautiful people and a striking but shallow technique, e.g., the 360  tracking shot closing Un Homme et une Femme. Many, too, felt uncomfortable with the Frenchman's contribution to 11'9'01 (September 11), though the episode in itself is harmless enough.

Director/writer/co-producer Lelouche's latest variation on a theme by Lelouch switches sands, this time to north Africa's, though otherwise And Now Ladies & Gentlemen follows form. The world will always welcome lovers, and at another showing, five-hundred-plus did so, oldsters recapturing that lost loving feeling. And undemanding young couples, too, will make this their hearts' own escape from reality.

For reality is not here. Any reflection at all uncovers holes through which the unconscious hero's sixty-foot boat would sail crewlessly with ease. Literally taking a cue from its own epigraph, nineteenth-century romantic writer Alfred de Musset's "life is a deep sleep of which love is the dream," the story sleepwalks us, too, a mere pretext for the leads to look pretty while reaching an ending obvious to all but them.

Beginning as a child pinching a lady street vendor's statuettes, Valentin Valentin (Jeremy Irons) grows tall, hungrily handsome, urbane, polyglot and skilled at sailing. A charmer whose oversize gun is for show, he robs high-end jewelry shops with an MO that in a real world might work once. He needs an escape from troublesome amnesiac blackouts and Commitment to love, and how better than a long solo ocean voyage.

She, Jane Lester (Patricia Kaas), is a cabaret singer losing her trumpeter-lover and partner-friend and, during memory lapses (in partial b&w), her bearings and song lyrics. Descending a notch to lounge singer, "for people who don't listen," she signs on for a month's booking at hotel bars and poolsides in Fez.

At sea, Valentin has fallen unconscious, drifted into port at Essaouira, and been directed to Fez for treatment. Conveniently, what may be the Third World country's only CAT scanner is there, and the same avuncular doctor and miracle neurosurgeon prescribes the same blue pills and catchphrases to both sufferers.

Aside from exotic name-echoes, this is not Morocco. An unsweaty eyeblink covers the actual arduous bus ride from coast to Fez, whose medina is a sanitized set, and action is limited to luxury hotels; without hats, canteen or perspiration but with cell phones (for plot purposes), fair-skinned Europeans hike twenty kilometers up- and downhill in killer 140° midday sun. Love contretemps arise, of course, along with a jewel theft that local police are anxious to pin on Valentin's reputation.

But leapfrogging a cuttable subplot involving a local boxer, his attractive wife and a too handy handyman-robber, and also a confused post-operation dream, this is no cat-burglar To Catch a Thief. (Puzzling homage to Hitchcock is also flashed in 20 Years Later redux' film-within-a-film.) Faith by itself will cure the chanteuse's amnesia and love-cynicism; the robber-yachtsman will need potentially more serious intervention.

Amor, however, vincit omnia.

With little required of them, the cast does not rise above caricature acting. Even Irons merely shrugs and looks either arch or lost. The throaty voice of French cabaret-jazz rage Kaas deserves better than Michel Legrand and catered-affair arrangements of standards whose lyrics jibe with plotline.

Still, if you want to use your eyes without engaging what's behind them, and have a handy hand to hold in the dark, then by all means, don't miss And Now Ladies & Gentlemen.

(Released by Paramount Classics and rated "PG-13" for momentary language.)