Cousin Bette . Newcity Chicago . 06-15-98

Cousin Bette

DIRECTED BY: Des McAnuff

REVIEWED: 06-15-98

Theater noteworthy Des McAnuff makes his feature film debut with this intermittently compelling take on the 1846 Balzac novel (adapted by playwrights Lynn Siefert and Susan Tarr), a "naughty" yet icy rendition that suggests both the delicious and dreary aspects of stage melodrama. In 1840s France, Jessica Lange is the aging maid who helps a young sculptor (Aden Young, handsome yet vacuously louche) from his neurasthenic torpor, only to find him falling in love with her very young cousin ("Trainspotting"'s perky Kelly Macdonald, here wan and petulant). The wheels of revenge begin to turn, and among the players ground under its twists are the wastrel paterfamilias (Hugh Laurie, boldly foppish), his good friend the richest man in Paris (Bob Hoskins, with the richest turn in the picture), and Elisabeth Shue as an untalented music hall tart who gets to bare her breasts and bottom repeatedly, to the delight of the show's audience. The music hall sets are the most diverting; otherwise, the handsome lighting by Andrzej Sekula resembles his rendering of space and depth in "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," drawing the story away from the characters and into the recesses of a stagey nineteenth-century gloom. 107m. Panavision.

--Ray Pride

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