Now Ms. Collette has returned to Australia to take center stage in a picture tailor-made for her spiky, aggressive yet subtly vulnerable personality. She plays Sandy, an aptly named geologist working for a software company with an ill-defined interest in mining. (Informative exposition is not one of the optional features on this particular acting vehicle). In her early scenes, Sandy projects an aggrieved malaise with her employers, all-business males, as well as her proverbially clueless Mum (Lynette Curran). As the picture opens, there's no man lurking on the horizon who can function even as a potential boyfriend-not that the almost mannish, rough-hewn looks and attire of the protagonist suggest a woman pining for a date. I never figured out exactly what Sandy's problem was inasmuch as there were no places in the script (or interested listeners on the screen) to provide a clarifying back story. At times, Sandy's brand of blond unruliness reminded me of Charlize Theron's moody serial murderess in Monster . Death is lurking here, all right, but not quite murder. (To my readers who do not wish to find out more explicit details of the plot, don't read any further until you have seen the movie for yourself-and I strongly recommend that you do.)

A love interest is suddenly and abruptly shoe-horned into the story when Sandy is sent by her superiors to pick up a young Japanese businessman named Tachibana Hiromitsu (Gotaro Tsunashima). His slim body and delicate features make him seem younger than the thirtysomething Sandy, and this visual disparity carries over into the subsequent sexual relationship, in which Sandy assumes the role of the male aggressor and Hiromitsu of the compliant female. But things get off to a rocky start when Hiromitsu casually assumes that Sandy has been hired as his full-time chauffeur; in one scene, he stands imperiously by his luggage, waiting for her to load it laboriously onto her rented Toyota minivan. Yet his youthfully poised simulation of dignity and self-control makes him seem as vulnerable as Sandy when it comes to breaking down emotional barriers.

It follows that we see the svelte Hiromitsu's body mostly in a bathing suit long before we see much of Sandy's-and more important, we see Sandy carefully appraising his physique long before he seems to show any interest in her as a woman. At first, he pretends to speak no English, forcing his Australian hosts to speak their very halting Japanese. But later, in a karaoke bar, he unexpectedly rises to sing a few bars of "Danny Boy" with its Irish-English lyrics. One cannot tell if this bizarre cross-cultural moment is meant to be meaningfully funny or mindlessly grotesque; his rendition of "Danny Boy" doesn't last long enough to fulfill either interpretation. When Hiromitsu is too drunk to navigate his way to his hotel room, Sandy reluctantly lends a helping arm to get him home.

By this time, Sandy and Hiromitsu have already engaged in a hazardous adventure deep in the Australian outback; Hiromitsu insists on going to explore some mineral deposits in the surface mines, despite Sandy's misgivings. Sure enough, the car stalls in a morass of loose sand with no traction for the tires. After a tense night in the cold desert, the couple team up to get the minivan on its way again.

It's at this point of comparative euphoria that Sandy makes her first sexual moves on the stoically patient Hiromitsu. Their level of communication remains linguistically primitive (and yet oddly aphoristic on occasion), but Ms. Collette's blazing eyes become beacons of desire on the visual level. She initiates an erotic escalation of their relationship by slowly undressing him as if she were preparing her child for sleep. She then moves away, and rejoins her curiously quiescent lover topless.

Then comes the strangest and most perplexing of all turns in the narrative: When Sandy rushes off tauntingly into a lake in her underwear, Hiromitsu follows her at the opposite end, but doesn't resurface after apparently hitting a shallow bottom. When he comes up-instead of applying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, or at least turning his body over to get some of the water out of his lungs-Sandy keeps dragging him face-up to needlessly higher ground, sobbing all the while in frustration. My screening companion and I just didn't get it: Sandy had been shown to be very resourceful in the Australian outback; why wasn't she doing more to save her lover's life? Had she too easily accepted the termination of a dead-end affair, after she had discovered that Hiromitsu had a wife and children back in Japan?

I suspect that Ms. Brooks and Ms. Tilson chose to risk losing suspension of disbelief in order to bring the story around to an unhindered contemplation of Sandy's innermost emotional evolution. Or was it that Hiromitsu had completed his useful involvement in the narrative after observing the extreme irony of coming from an overpopulated Japan starved for space, juxtaposed against the vast Australian vistas, devoid of people? He concludes by saying that the stark contrast between these two worlds threatens to drive him mad. Japan, of course, plays an active part in Australia's "Asia trauma," and as such provides one subtext of Japanese Story .

But the heart of the story beats most strongly in Sandy's final scenes of mourning, and her very formal but deeply moving meeting with her dead lover's generous Japanese widow. It's in these searchingly reflective moments that Ms. Collette's enormous emotional range as an actress is thrillingly explored.

Iranian Intrigue

Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold , from a screenplay by Abbas Kiarostami, combines the talents of two of Iran's most forceful critics of their country's theocratic regime. Mr. Panahi, in particular, has paid a price for what the Iranian authorities perceive as Crimson Gold 's seditious cinema. The film has been banned in Iran, and Mr. Panahi himself has been detained and interrogated. The film begins with a robbery in a jewelry store just before the manager has been murdered, and before the alarm is set off, trapping the would-be robber behind an automatically descending iron gate that precedes his own suicide. The entire action is captured in a single four-minute, camera-steady shot taken from the inside of the store, and looking out onto the street and its passers-by.

The movie then flashes back to the incidents that led up to the death of the robber, who was formerly a pizza deliveryman named Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin). The actor who plays Hussein is not only a pizza deliveryman in real life, but also a certified paranoid-schizophrenic whose violent outbursts created many problems for the director. Mr. Panahi's bizarre behind-the-scenes tribulations, as described to an interviewer, are characteristic of the uneasy comic tone that's set in the film: In the course of Hussein's misadventures, he exposes the deep gulf of inequality and injustice separating the rich from the poor in Iran.

To make matters worse for Iran's official censors, there's a long sequence detailing the police surveillance of a notorious establishment where unattached men and women congregate to dance and drink and do who-knows-what-else together. Hussein, who is engaged to the younger sister (Azita Rayeji) of his best friend Ali (Kamyar Sheisi), is much too repressed and underprivileged to partake in such secular delights, making him a curiously detached witness to the repressive mechanisms of the puritanical mullahs.

Mr. Panahi has dealt with this subject before, from the point of view of the victimized women in The Circle (2000), but he's probably best known in America for The White Balloon (1995), in which a child's wide-eyed view of Tehran serves as cover for some trenchant social criticism of a seemingly neutral background.

It's clear that the director has more than a passing interest in the fact that Hussein is a wounded veteran of the long-drawn-out Iran-Iraq War-the seemingly endless conflict in which the United States took the side of that other Hussein, even after he'd used chemical weapons against Iranian troops. Though Mr. Panahi claims to be an "independent artist" free of any "political" agenda, his position seems very close to that of the disillusioned Marxist Iranian left-who, after clamoring for the removal of the shah, found themselves chafing under the more insidious tyranny of the ayatollah.

Riddled With

Complexities

Tony Shalhoub's Made-Up , from a screenplay by Lynne Adams, stars Brooke Adams as Elizabeth James Tivey, an actress who has given up her career to become a wife and mother. Now a single mother, Elizabeth's older daughter Kate (played by the screenwriter) plans to shake Mom's life up a bit, the plan being to film a documentary about the onetime actress' "makeover" at the hands of her teen-age daughter, Sara (Eva Amurri). Elizabeth's husband, Duncan (Gary Sinise), has already left her for a much younger woman, Molly Avruns (Light Eternity), making the jilted older woman much more amenable to Sara's nonsurgical overhaul. All the while, Kate and her camera crew are on hand to record the process.

As tangled and tormented as these Pirandellian proceedings may seem, there is a lot of en famille involved in Mr. Shalhoub's oddly convoluted film-within-a-film, a currently overworked conceit among neophyte filmmakers. Mr. Shalhoub has suddenly exploded from his respected niche as a colorful character actor into the cable-television superstardom of Monk , an irresistible mixture of cerebral sleuthing and hypochondriac hysterics. Here he doubles as Elizabeth's shy suitor, both in the film and, happily, outside it (Mr. Shalhoub is, in fact, Ms. Adams' husband).

Duncan, the defecting husband, wisely avoids Sara's camera as best he can. The rest of the cast spend so much time trying to avoid tripping over each other and the electric wires strewn all over the carpets that the suspension of disbelief becomes an increasingly strenuous chore. Even so, we often get glimpses of the imperishably attractive Ms. Adams, now in her mid-50's, as she summons the gloriously knowing expressions from Days of Heaven (1978), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Cuba (1979) and The Dead Zone (1983). It's probably these expressions that inspired Mr. Shalhoub to get this overly complicated enterprise off the ground, and I can't find it in my heart to blame him.

Golden Bowl , from a screenplay by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, based on the novel

by Henry James, and produced by Ismail Merchant, reunites the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala

team on a cinematic adaptation of a Henry James classic-reportedly for the last

time, though this will probably not deter the pseudo-brutalists from their

sneering condescension toward the alleged sins of gentility and formality,

summed up in the catch-all epithet " Masterpiece

Theatre ." Indeed, the firm of Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala seems never to have

been forgiven for demonstrating, in A

Room With a View (1986) and Howards

End (1992) particularly, that there was money to be made and awards to be

won for bringing to the screen reasonable replicas of great literary works for

viewers who don't move their lips when they read.

This is not to say that the new movie version of The Golden Bowl is beyond criticism

because of the good intentions of its makers. Far from it. That the film came

out as well as it did, considering that the novel is perhaps James' greatest,

densest and most exquisitely articulated work, is itself little short of a

miracle. I was particularly worried in advance by the casting of Nick Nolte as

American widower Adam Verver and Uma Thurman as American expatriate Charlotte

Stant. They just didn't sound right for the parts, somehow; they just sounded

available. As it turned out, they were just fine, even though their characters

were made subtly more dominant in the end than those of the more aptly cast

Kate Beckinsale, as Maggie Verver, and Jeremy Northam, as Prince Amerigo. In

the process, the original point of the James story has been interestingly

blurred.

For people who have not read the book-and they have always

greatly outnumbered the people who have, even in the select ranks of art-house

patrons-I should try to explain what I think the point of the story was for

James. According to the production notes, the plot of the novel "was inspired

by an anecdote James heard concerning a young woman and her widower father who

learned that their spouses were engaged in an affair." Over the years, there

have been movies in which two people discover that their respective spouses are

cheating on them with each other. Usually, the betrayed pair get their own back

by completing the adulterous quadrille. This is not possible with a father and

a daughter. Still, the relationship between Adam Verver and his daughter Maggie

comes very close to incest in terms of emotional intimacy and rapport.

In fact, the relationship between Maggie and her father is

more extensively developed than that between the father and Charlotte, the

young stepmother; between Maggie and her husband, Prince Amerigo; between

Maggie and Charlotte, her school friend; or between Charlotte and the Prince,

who had been intimate before Maggie's marriage and after. As a result, Maggie

and Charlotte end up in a mutually constructed web of deception and

manipulation. If there is a feeling of loss at the end of the book, it is most

strongly felt by Maggie and her father over their enforced separation to save

her marriage to the Prince.

The Golden Bowl is

James' most thinly populated novel, with but four major characters and only one

go-between, Anjelica Huston's Fanny Assingham. Though Fanny's omnipresence has

been somewhat reduced in the movie, she does get to smash the golden bowl, as

in the book, to eliminate the metaphorical evidence of the Prince's betrayal of

Maggie with Charlotte, but to no avail. Maggie knows, but she does not want

Charlotte to know that she knows-partly for Charlotte's sake, partly for the

sake of her marriage, but mostly for the sake of her beloved father. That is

why the movie should end with Maggie and the Prince in a troubled embrace as in

the book, and not with a black-and-white projection of Adam and Charlotte

arriving in America with all his art treasures, like the beneficent robber

barons of old, the J.P. Morgans and Andrew Carnegies and such.

I suspect that Mr. Ivory

was driven to his alternate ending because of his weariness with the enervating

Europe of Henry James. Certainly, Adam's art treasures and his dreams of a

magnificent museum in an "American city" are there in James' novel, and one can

make of these dreams what one will, but the heart of the drama is the ultimate

triumph of Maggie over Charlotte, at whatever cost.

I suspect also that Mr. Ivory and Ms. Jhabvala were

uncomfortable with the suggestion in the James novel that money does indeed

make the world go around-and indeed, as much in matters of the heart as in

matters of state. When you think about it, The

Golden Bowl is a case of the rich, seemingly innocent Americans brilliantly

manipulating a cash-poor Italian prince and a Europeanized but also poor American

beauty. Thus, the only true love in the story-that between the Prince and

Charlotte-is thwarted by the sheer weight of the money involved. Maggie is not

at all humiliated by her awareness that she has purchased a Prince with her

father's immense wealth. This is the way of the world, though not the way of

most movies. Yet that seeming crassness is what makes The Golden Bowl such an original story for the cinema.

A curious addition to the movie I do not recall from the

book is a violent period flashback-that is, much earlier than James' early 20th

century-of an abduction, with swordplay, of a woman sleeping in the Prince's

Roman palace. It may be a joke played by Merchant-Ivory on their more

bloodthirsty critics: You want violence, we'll give you violence-and now back

to our more customary civilized graces.

I must say that Ms.

Beckinsale, whose star in the movie firmament seems to be rising, comes close

to capturing the sublimity of Maggie, despite the obvious fact that no movie

can capture the elegant copiousness of James' prose. I for one am grateful to

the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala troika for even trying to climb a literary Mount

Everest like The Golden Bowl . Their

zest and taste is particularly refreshing when so much of filmmaking has

descended to the most vulgar level of the bottom line. They deserve better in

the way of critical reaction, and I hope they get it.

The Invisible Women

Jafar Panahi's The Circle ( Dayereh ), from a screenplay by Kambuzia Partovi, based on an

original idea by Mr. Panahi, suggests for a time that the plight of women in

Iran is almost comparable to the plight of Jews in Nazi Germany. The

misogynistic persecution begins in the maternity ward of a Teheran hospital,

where a woman in a chador waits before a closed rectangular panel for news of

her daughter's delivery. The ultrasound test had promised a boy, but a nurse

opens the panel to announce that the daughter delivered a girl instead. The

woman in the chador turns for the first time toward the camera, and we see her

face: sorrowful, almost terrified. It is the face of a woman who knows her

son-in-law's family will abandon her daughter. The woman flees as the in-laws

arrive. She is but the first victim of an institutionalized oppression of women

in Iran and other Muslim countries. In a circular narrative, Mr. Panahi tracks

the separate but similar predicaments in which eight women find themselves on

the streets of Teheran.

Pari (Fereshteh Sadr Orfani), after escaping from prison,

flees her home for fear her two brothers will kill her for disgracing the

family-and they don't even know that she is pregnant and unmarried. Pari

searches through the city for someone who can perform an abortion, which can be

obtained legally only with the written permission of a husband, father or other

male relative. (It was news to me that abortions were permitted in Iran at all,

with or without permission.) She seeks the help of Elham (Elham Saboktakin), a

nurse married to a doctor in her hospital but estranged from her family because

of her prison record.  But Elham cannot

help Pari without incriminating herself with her husband. Indeed, all the women

in The Circle have prison records of

one kind or another, but we're never told why they were sent to prison in the

first place. A movie in which the eight women characters are either escaped

convicts or ex-convicts would not seem to qualify as a fair cross-section of

Iranian women. Still, it is through the misadventures of these women that Mr.

Panahi illuminates several of the restrictions that apply to all Iranian women.

Mr. Panahi credits the inspiration for the story to a

journalistic source: "One day I noticed a small article in the newspaper: A

woman committed suicide after killing her two daughters. There was nothing

about the reasons behind the crime or suicide. Perhaps the newspapers did not

see any need, since in many communities, women are most deprived. Their freedom

is limited to the point it seems as if they are in a big prison. This is not

only true for a particular class of women, but for all of them. As if each

woman could replace another in a circle, making them all the same."

Hence, it matters little whether the character is named

Arezou (Maryiam Parvin Almani), Nargess (Nargess Mamizadeh), the hardly seen,

hapless mother of a despised daughter at infancy in the beginning of the

picture (Solmaz Gholami), Monir (MonirArab),Nayereh (Fatemeh Naghavi), who

abandons her daughter in the hope that she will find an enlightened family to

care for her, or Mojgan (Mojgan Faramarzi), who "adjusts" after a fashion to

the injustice. The society itself is the villain. And, as in The White Balloon (1995), Mr. Panahi

displays great skill in directing non-actors.