AND NOW . . . LADIES AND GENTLEMEN [1/2]

A man and a woman . . . and a snooze. In English and French, with English sub titles. Running time: 126 minutes. Rated PG-13 (sexuality, profanity). At the Quad, the 64th and Second.

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THE veteran French filmmaker Claude Lelouch’s “And Now . . . Ladies and Gentlemen” is one part cabaret, one part travelogue, one part comic heist, one part romantic tearjerker – and all pretty tedious.

It starts off promisingly, as elegant gentleman thief Valentin Valentin (Jeremy Irons) ingeniously relieves a Bulgari store of its diamonds.

But Lelouch keeps cutting between Valentin’s clever heists – in one, he poses as a dowager – and sultry ballads performed by Jane Lester (French singer Patricia Kaas).

It takes forever before we learn that both Valentin and Jane are suffering from the same potentially fatal neurological condition.

Abandoning his wife and partner in crime (Alessandra Martines), Valentin sets off on a round-the-world yacht cruise.

Passing out at the wheel, he ends up in Morocco – where Jane is performing at a hotel, part of a chain whose name crops up frequently.

After meeting through their doctor, they decide to set off for a religious shrine in the desert to cure their conditions.

But Valentin is detained when a wealthy woman (’60s sexpot Claudia Cardinale, looking the worse for the years) is relieved of her diamonds at knifepoint by a masked intruder in the hotel.

This attempt to cross Hitchcock’s “To Catch a Thief” with the old Hollywood weepie “One-Way Passage” wouldn’t work even if Lelouche – director of the schmaltz classic “A Man and a Woman” – didn’t keep dragging things out with lengthy musical numbers and subplots.

Irons isn’t bad, but as this overlong whimsy lurches past the two-hour mark, you may be finding the introductory caption – “Life is a deep sleep” – all too prophetic.