"Ma Femme est une Actrice/ My Wife is an Actress"

''I love the movies,'' says John (Terence Stamp) in the writer and director Yvan Attal's noisily enjoyable romantic comedy ''My Wife Is an Actress,'' which will be shown tonight and tomorrow as part of the New Directors/New Film series at the Museum of Modern Art. It's obvious that Mr. Attal, who also stars in the film, loves the movies, too; he's made a terrifically deft picture about the thick line that separates movie glamour from the real world, and the thin line between common sense and paranoia.

Maybe it might be better to look upon ''Actress'' as the latest version of a much unremarked-upon subgenre: the jealousy comedy. Mr. Stamp as John, a British movie star with the saturnine self-possession and silken purr of a tomcat warming itself in front of a fireplace, is the bête noire of Yvan (Mr. Attal), or rather, bête grise, with a flattering though receding lawn of snow-white hair.

John is co-starring with Yvan's actress-wife, Charlotte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), in a romantic drama. And Yvan, like most mortal men in such situations, is being nibbled alive by jealousy. Yvan is a neurotic imp, a reporter for the Parisian version of ESPN. Everywhere they go, he's reminded of his wife's desirability. They're constantly beset by autograph hounds. Even a policeman who pulls them over for a routine traffic stop is transformed into a gawker; the officer asks for Charlotte's identification though Yvan is at the wheel. He guards his wife as if she were in a seraglio and his jealousy is evocative of such screwball comedies as Preston Sturges's ''Unfaithfully Yours.''

 

''Actress'' begins with Ella Fitzgerald crooning ''Lullaby of Broadway'' as a succession of black-and-white stills of lovingly photographed goddesses, including Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Louise Brooks and Lupe Velez, rolls during the opening credits, although a disconcerting shot of Joan Crawford in full Scream Theater mode has been thrown in. That selection is one of Mr. Attal's few missteps. His ''Actress'' is clearly in thrall to Woody Allen's epic sketches of self-loathing, though the picture has a beckoning blast of energy that indicates it's a response to the perky French sex farces in which jealousy passes like a spring rain.

''She doesn't sleep around,'' he says of his wife to a friend, but the latter insists, ''It's her job.'' Such instances show that Yvan's envy builds up like a series of paper cuts -- at first, merely irritating but developing into a genuine, gaping wound as it increases.

Yvan's fretting over John as a leading man with his wife is understandable. Mr. Stamp plays the actor as a man who has a way of slipping inside people's personal space without violating it. Though he doesn't have much screen time, Mr. Stamp makes John's ease a kind of low-intensity joie de vivre. John wryly observes that he loves the movies in a scene playing out Charlotte's resistance to doing a nude sequence. When her director insists and she angrily lets him know how vulnerable she feels, ''Actress'' flips the script in a way that only ends up exacerbating Yvan's discomfort.

  

There are certainly parallels to be drawn between ''Actress'' and Mr. Attal's real life. Off camera, he's actually married to his co-star, and the movie, presumably, must be partially a nightmare version of his own experience. The fun, too, comes in watching Ms. Gainsbourg and Mr. Stamp together. He's show-biz nobility with his memorable performance in ''Billy Budd'' (1962), and she's descended from equally lofty 60's pop iconography; her father was the French pop star Serge Gainsbourg, and her mother, the actress and model Jane Birkin, embodies such drop-dead chic that Hermès still can't keep enough bags named after her in stock.

Ms. Gainsbourg is a winning performer, too -- a beguiling mixture of willowy plaintiveness and slightly irregular beauty lit up by a goofy smile. And she can't understand why her husband is so upset. He makes himself the butt of the joke, a baleful puppy with a premature furrow in his brow. Between Yvan's rancor and other events, it's almost as if she's being led into an affair. During a press junket, she's repeatedly peppered with the same question about her leading man -- ''How's it feel to work with him?'' -- and she answers with ''I'm very excited'' so many times, she may come to believe it.

Though Mr. Attal's forehead is rumpled, there's no sloppiness in ''Actress''; it's organized to find its comedy simply and quickly, for the most part. A subplot involving Yvan's sister Nathalie's over-zealousness in immersing her son-to-be in Jewish tradition is too unrelenting. The point is made effectively in the first couple of instances; Natalie's railing comes off as shrill. Maybe that picture of Joan Crawford was included for a reason.

Obviously, Mr. Attal wants to show that obsession runs in the family, but the movie overdoes this angle. He succeeds in other places, though, like getting a laugh out of the martial stomp of the Clash's ''London Calling'' when Yvan jumps on a train from Paris to visit Charlotte in London, where her movie is being made.

''My wife's in a cult,'' he sighs, miserably, on the train. But he is, too, and with ''My Wife Is an Actress,'' he does a fine job of inviting us to join him. 

''My Wife Is an Actress'' is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sexual situations.

MY WIFE IS AN ACTRESS

Written (in French, with English subtitles) and directed by Yvan Attal; director of photography, Rémy Chevrin; edited by Jennifer Auger; production designer, Katia Wyszkop; produced by Claude Berri; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 93 minutes.
WITH: Charlotte Gainsbourg (Charlotte), Yvan Attal (Yvan), Terence Stamp (John), Noémie Lvovsky (Nathalie), Laurent Bateau (Vincent), Ludivine Sagnier (Geraldine), Keith Allen (David), Lionel Abelanski (Georges) and Jo McInne (Assistant Director).