Claude Lelouch’s Bizarre Male-Crisis Comedy

Five years ago, French writer-director Claude Lelouch returned, for the second time, to the site of his greatest career success with “The Best Years of a Life,” an autumnal sequel to his trend-setting 1966 romance “A Man and a Woman” that felt elegiac in multiple senses — not least since it turned out to be the final onscreen appearance for both its stars, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée. Anyone who assumed it might be Lelouch’s sign-off, however, was quite mistaken. He’s made three features since, the latest of which, “Finally,” seems fashioned from its title down as a sort of career summation from the 86-year-old filmmaker, but not portentously so. A peculiar, weightless confection that bounces antically between narratives, perspectives, periods and varying grips on reality, it treats even grave mortal matters with near-cartoonish buoyancy.

Premiering out of competition at the Venice Film Festival, accompanying a career-achievement award presentation to Lelouch, his 51st feature is an unapologetically self-involved work, strictly for the director’s most devoted admirers. (A French release has been scheduled for November 13, but it’ll be a far harder sell elsewhere.) Loyalists may have fun parsing various in-jokes and nested references to Lelouch’s own oeuvre, as once again, he delves into his sizable back catalogue for inspiration, this time landing on some deeper cuts. The uninitiated are likely to be left completely adrift by the film’s tonal ricochets between cornball comedy and moist-eyed melodrama, with all the chanson interludes you’d expect from a project that bills itself in the opening credits as “a musical fable brought to life by Claude Lelouch.” If your toes curl then and there, consider that your cue to leave.

“Finally” nominally picks up on characters, story strands and even song snippets from 1972’s “Money Money Money” and 1973’s “Happy New Year” — both crime capers headlined by Italian star Lino Ventura, both excerpted here as flashbacks — though their bearing on the present may be clear only to the director himself. The new film’s protagonist, middle-aged lawyer Lino Cassaro (comedian Kad Merad) shares his name with the career criminal at the center of “Money Money Money.” Perhaps Lelouch is sampling himself to offer some comment on the duality of man, though the simpler explanation is that the former is the latter’s son, motivated toward the right side of the law by his father’s shady adventures.

Successful in his career and married to Léa (Elsa Zylberstein, in a thankless role), a famous and much younger actress, Lino Jr. seems an unlikely candidate to drop everything and head off alone on a walking journey across France. This impulsive decision, it turns out, is the result of a mysterious movie-science brain condition that suddenly prevents the successful defense attorney from lying — an affliction that has messy consequences for his job and his marriage.

There’s a more serious neurological disorder at work here too, as we learn in the course of his episodic, golden-lit trek, which sees him bonding with various salt-of-the-earth folks along the way — notably a neglected, piano-playing farm wife (Françoise Gillard), who responds eagerly to his leading suggestion that she watch “The Bridges of Madison County.” Another subplot, rather abruptly shoehorned into proceedings, revolves around another “Money Money Money” descendant: Lino’s half-sister Sandrine (Sandrine Bonnaire), the daughter of an activist for sex workers’ rights (played by Nicole Courcel in the 1972 film), who has continued fighting her mother’s cause in the present day.

It’s a development that sits oddly amid all the film’s surrounding frippery, as do some haphazard Second World War flashbacks — set particularly oddly to a busy, jaunty jazz score by celebrated trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf that may represent the film’s chief asset to non-aficionados of its director. More complementary to the film’s musical design is Lino’s passion for trumpet-playing, picked up along the way on his journey. This unfortunately enables multiple reprises of a grievously whimsical ballad of the romance between a horn and a piano, but does at least give us a memorably odd scene of our hero riffing away on his instrument at Le Mans on race day, as cars screech and zoom below.

In what increasingly feels like a stream-of-consciousness exercise, editor Stéphane Mazalaigue embraces blunt transitions and tonal swerves, though the film doesn’t seem entirely in command of its incoherence. Maxine Heraud’s digital lensing alternates between heavily filtered stylization and a somewhat harsh candid aesthetic, but never quite channels the romanticism of vintage Lelouch — not as much, at least, as the catchy, oft-repeated title song, most affectingly performed by Merad and Eurovision star Barbara Pravi (playing Lino’s daughter) at the long-brewing emotional climax of this cluttered, often baffling film. “Life chases us, embraces us, replaces us,” they sing tremulously: “Finally” does all three in any given scene.