Camille Turns On

Historians have long claimed that each age rewrites history to suit its own needs; Camille 2000--a fleshy, futuristic updating of Alexandre Dumas' much-revived melodrama--is the application of that assertion to the screen. In former incarnations, Marguerite Gautier, called Camille because of her penchant for camellias, was a Parisian courtesan whose headlong rush toward death was interrupted only by a brief but all-consuming love affair. Camille 2000 shifts the action to Rome, hypes the timeworn plot with an overdose of la dolce vita, Hollywood style, and revamps the traditional tubercular finale into an amphetamine fadeout. As the star-crossed symbol of the fast, empty life, Danièle Gaubert (at right, with Nino Castelnuovo)--who at 25 already has 15 films and a stormy marriage to dictator Trujillo's son behind her--moves through a lavish world inhabited by professional partygoers, homosexuals and sated sylphs of every stripe. For her, life is a spiritual vacuum filled only partially by lover Armand Duval; but for audiences, Camille 2000 is intended as an exotic comment on the decadent trend of contemporary high society.