In Merci Docteur Rey, directed and written by Andrew Litvack, two dead bodies threaten to bring reality to the fantasy lives of several narcissistic characters. The first dead body emerges quite early in the film. Twenty-three-year-old Thomas Beaumont (played by Stanislas Merhar), who has been paid 1,500 francs to hide in the closet of a Paris apartment at 11 p.m., witnesses as an apparent young Arab hustler (played by Karim Saleh) murders a john, the Frenchman (played by Simon Callow) who has hired Thomas through a sex ad in a newspaper. The second dead body, that of psychiatrist Dr. Rey, turns up almost at the same time, when Pénélope (played by Jane Birkin) arrives for a regular appointment, lies upon the psychiatric couch, babbles on about her troubles, and then discovers that Dr. Rey is dead. Thomas, recoiling from being a witness to a murder, soon enters Dr. Rey’s office, whereupon Pénélope pretends for a time to be the psychiatrist while Thomas shares his fears. Soon, Thomas discovers the dead body of Dr. Rey as well as a prescription vial which provides a clue that the psychiatrist has died of a heart attack. For most of the rest of the film, the narcissisms of the various characters are revealed, albeit overdramatically. Thomas enjoys annoying male prostitutes, who place rent-boy ads in the same publications as the dead Frenchman, by arranging assignations and then pulling off no-shows, while pretending to his mother Elisabeth Beaumont (played by Dianne Wiest) that he is carrying on an affair with a nonexistent Linda. Elisabeth, an American opera singer in town to sing the title role of Turandot, is trying to be a good mother but is more concerned with her career. Years ago, she walked out on her husband when she caught him having sex with a man, so Thomas is the one love in her life, though she never told him that his father was alive and gay in Paris. Pénélope is an actress who cannot advance her career beyond the job of dubbing French female voices of English films; she especially enjoys dubbing Vanessa Redgrave, who has a cameo role in the film. After Thomas and Pénélope meet in Dr. Rey’s office, they accompany each other throughout much of the film, not only in Pénélope’s apartment but also Elisabeth’s dressing room, alongside each other at the opera house, and ultimately in the apartment of the Arab hustler. Since there are two dead bodies, one of which has been murdered, the Paris police enter the story in search of fact rather than fantasy, and they slowly if ineptly build a case against Elisabeth as the most likely suspect. After all, she has she a possible motive of revenge, there is a record of a telephone call from her apartment to the murdered man, her former husband, on the night of the murder (though of course Thomas made that call, not knowing the murdered man was his father), and the police locate the payoff money. When the police finally decide to arrest Elisabeth for paying the Arab hustler to kill her former husband, all the principal characters are in the latter’s apartment; but, in the end, both are cleverly exonerated by Thomas. Perhaps everyone in the film has learned from the experience, perhaps they continue to live narcissistically, and perhaps filmviewers have been entertained by the lame comedy of the implausible story that would better suit the New York stage. Or perhaps not. MH