In French with English subtitles. Starring Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi and Jean-Marc Barr. Rating unavailable. Opens Friday, August 12, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

French farce has always been about compromise: older men learning to accept that their younger wives occasionally require the attentions of more vigorous lovers; seasoned mistresses nobly standing aside so that their boy-toys can wed well-dowered heiresses; straight-laced parents grudgingly accepting their children's ill-advised marital preferences. The form is eternally set in the late 19th century, and the mores are implacably bourgeois.

Although rooted in vaudeville, because of its unavoidable reliance on recorded sound, the movie musical is inseparable from the middle decades of the 20th century. Despite the fact that the genre was slightly more puritanical than the bedroom farce-how could it not be, when faced with the strictures of Hollywood's then-prevailing Hays Code?-it was also more democratic, occasionally allowing class-challenged nobodies to float to the top of the romantic heap.

In a serious of commercially successful features (Jeanne and the Perfect Guy; Funny Felix), French filmmakers Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau have sought to fuse both sets of conventions into a new kind of gay comedy of manners. If their films don't look particularly American, that's probably because their cinematic models are not America's Busby Berkeley and Stanley Donen, but the irreproachably French René Clair and Jacques Demy.

Like so many postwar Gallic romances, this one takes place at the beach. Béatrix (Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi) is companionably married to Marc (Gilbert Melki), while carrying on an affair with the more passionate Mathieu (Jacques Bonnaffé). Both parents arrive at the (false) conclusion that their son Charly (Romain Torres) is gay, largely because his best friend Martin (Edouard Collin) so obviously is.

And then there's Didier (Jean-Marc Barr), a plumber whose erotic radar points in an unexpected direction.

Needless to say, everyone winds up with the right partner in the end, with all the real-world consequences of their various decisions conveniently sidestepped. And if you can stomach the bad music and worse dancing and unrelenting cheerfulness, it's entirely possible that you might actually have fun on this Feydeauesque Cíƒ ´te d'Azur.