Actress Julie Christie is crossing the Channel to add British intellectual weight to a lighthearted French ghost movie called Belphegor.
The Oscar-winning actress is playing a character called Glenda Spencer, a British Museum Egyptologist, alongside French star Sophie Marceau in the title role.
Miss Christie's bespectacled academic is called in to examine a mummy newly discovered in store in the depths of the museum, an examination that results in a bizarre series of events.
The film's star cast, assembled by director Jean-Paul Salome, includes veteran French actor Michel Serrault with whom Miss Christie has a dalliance.
Although it does not need a French director to tell us, it is still good to hear him expound on her virtues. Salome says: "Julie Christie is an extraordinary woman and a rare person."
The film derives from a 1960s cult TV series and traces the haunting of the Louvre, the world's biggest museum, by a tormented Egyptian spirit. The ghost enters the body of Sophie Marceau, who is found at the beginning of the film nursing her ailing grandmother in an apartment overlooking the museum.
Playing a key role in this updated, big-screen version of the television series is the glass pyramid in the Louvre courtyard.
Though now a familiar Paris landmark, it was not built or even conceived of at the time of the original TV series.
As might be deduced from the casting of Miss Christie and Miss Marceau in Belphegor, beautiful women are very much part of the plot. In the original, the title role was taken by Left-bank chanteuse Juliette Greco and she makes a fleeting cameo appearance in the new film.
Referring to the cameo, Salome says: "It was very much a question of passing the baton."
