“May Fools” is the comic complement to Malle’s heartbreaking autobiographical film “Au revoir les enfants.” With a masterly hand, Malle leads his captivating cast through an intricate farce (coscripted by Jean Claude Carriere) involving almost every human appetite from lust to eating to greed. This is the best ensemble of the year in any language: Miou-Miou makes avarice seem romantic; Dominique Blanc is spiteful, sexy and touching as a lesbian who loses her lover to a boy inflamed by rebellion, and the incomparable Piccoli goes beyond mere acting to pure incandescence. It’s fitting that the 82-year-old Dubost was in Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece, “Rules of the Game.” In its wit, subversive yet embracing, in its pastoral beauty, “May Fools” has the tang of a Renoir for our time.
