Child Under a Leaf

You've surely seen the prizewinning 'drink and drive' ad where a couple leave a cinema - she muttering that she doesn't know why they make them so sad - and go and get legless before crashing? This might well have been the film they saw: it's a formula two Kleenex movie, and enough to drive anyone to drink. Dyan Cannon is married to the sort of man who'd kill her pet poodle (he does), but she has a beautiful relationship with artist Donald Pilon, who's the father of her newborn child, and they phone each other every day, and regularly zoom off in matching white sports cars for lyrical lovemaking in the fields, and agonise over the husband's violent tendencies. Director Bloomfield's own script veers off into ever more embarrassing melodrama, but his efforts are hardly necessary: Francis Lai's super-lush score tells the whole sorry story.