With its romantic coincidences, its exotic locale, and a plot filled with just enough mysterious turns to pad out the story, And Now Ladies & Gentlemen could double as beach reading if anyone ever boiled it down from celluloid. In book form, it would benefit from readers' ability to put it down and hit the surf whenever it took a turn toward the ludicrous. In its present state, it benefits only from lush cinematography, an unabashedly romantic score by Michel Legrand, and photogenic leads Jeremy Irons and Patricia Kaas. A French jazz singer making her acting debut, Kaas gives the film an electric charge whenever she breaks into song, but director Claude Lelouch (A Man And A Woman, A Man And A Woman: 20 Years Later) also requires her to act, one of many leaps of faith that don't pay off. Among others: introducing a movie-friendly disease that causes characters to black out at only the most dramatic moments, and casting Irons as the least convincing master of disguise since, well, The Master Of Disguise. Irons plays a high-class jewel thief trying to go straight. Unfortunately, he reaches this decision only after a torturous sequence in which he dresses up like what's supposed to be an old woman, but looks instead like a Halloween-costume Quentin Crisp. Years later, stricken with a mysterious brain ailment, he hits the high seas, washing up on the shores of Morocco, where a similarly afflicted Kaas gives erratic performances in the lounge of a fancy hotel. Eventually, they seek out a desert shaman to cure them, but not before spoiled, jet-setting wife Claudia Cardinale accuses Irons of stealing some jewels, necessitating a low-speed police chase. But then, everything here unfolds at half-time, as if Lelouch thought scenery alone would do his work for him. It works for a little while, but an Irons-narrated slideshow of the region would have worked just as well.