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...On the surface, it puts a young Texas woman (Kim Basinger) and her ex-husband (Jeff Bridges) through some comic perils before reuniting them in shaky matrimony...

...Leland knows the indecencies of the latter almost too well for the comic purposes of Wish You Were Here, especially when he draws the disgusting character of a bookie and film projectionist (Tom Bell) who lives asocially in the dome of an oceanside movie house...

...A decisive change occurs, however, when Polly begins work for an art gallery director named Gabrielle (Paule Baillergeon) whom she titles lovingly The Curator...

...Heywood gives it a moment's real force...

...Rozema blends into normal color once the story is well underway, but returns to the video camera and its grainy, blurry images throughout...

...Still, Rozema has made something special...

...Another name for Nadine is nowhere...

...Leland is too honest a writer not to concede some worth to Lloyd's father...

...Eternal youth...

...As noted before in this column, the really funny thing about secular liberals is the way they invert Victorian standards, then proceed to use their new dogmas to judge people as harshly as any of our puritanical forebears...

...Basinger plays an Austin manicurist with a drawl and set of gestures memorized from the Bad Actresses' School of Recognizable Southern Pouts...

...sometimes I laughed simply contrasting her wealth of insight on the last with that expensive Hollywood "art-world" travesty, Legal Eagles...

...While credible as real estate fact, the church setting never attains any symbolic resonance...

...What was on Benton's mind...

...Robert Benton, who won an Oscar for Kramer vs Kramer and was nominated for Places in the Heart, directed the film, but fails to evoke the former's strength in dealing with marriage or the latter's power with Texas landscape...

...nostalgia on his part, but Benton cuts him short...

...But this is Rozema's film above all...

...Even Benton's chase scenes and send-up of film noir don't work...

...Her best moment occurs when she tries to remember a phrase of the Curator's about unambitious people and "their half lives, half lived...

...She is played by Pat Hey wood, whom some might recall as the nurse in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet...

...Here, too, she provides some sad, worldly "wisdom" in the film's only strong scene in its second half...

...This time, at Cannes, they made no mistake...

...McCarthy, narrating retrospectively, catches Polly's sweet, beautiful-loser quality without sentimentalizing it...

...His main passion in this film seems to be for locale, Texas, Fifties Americana, Lone Star Beer...

...Its young Canadian director, Pa-tricia Rozema, won the Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes this spring...

...But when the acting improves, the direction undoes it...

...Unintentionally, it puns on its title: the content is nada, nothing, nullity, a giant zero...

...She errs just once in cutting a scene involving octopus sushi in a Japanese restaurant...

...Other artists contribute to the wacky sublimity of Mermaids, especially Anne Marie MacDonald, as the Curator's real woman lover, and Mark Korven, who provides intense choral and percussive accompaniments to Polly's fantasies...

...Her world-weary lyricism is itself breathtaking...

...She's always photographed in earnestly declaratory pink, orange, or yellow dresses...

...She manages no chemistry with Bridges except in one scene where she turns on her repertoire of sighs and whispers from such sultry X-rated films as 9 1/2 Weeks...

...Written and directed by David Leland, who wrote last years' superb Mona Lisa and the recent Personal Services, the new film uses its location to map a social coast, the border between middle-class propriety and boardwalk sleaze...

...Indeed, it's one of the best comedies in some time...

...Universal respect...

...The vestiges of intelligence in Nadine are like the "cosmic background radiation" (plus 3 degrees Kelvin) left all over space from the Big Bang...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...The "film" in fact starts as a video, with Polly telling us the story by means of a video machine which (we later find out) she stole from the gallery...

...Director Rozema also uses some playful technical innovations that match and enrich content...

...Baillergeon, for example, often exemplifies the pomposities of the art world as she discusses modernist works with rich clients and theory-sodden critics...

...The wise whimsy of Mermaids makes it ten times more serious and enjoyable...

...What went wrong...

...A man without a story is lost even in such a country...

...N adine was dangerously titled...

...Her mastering of the phrase forecasts her future...

...Did he think Nadine could live on nostalgia alone...

...And someday to make something breathtakingly beautiful that lasts forever...

...she's often positioned between walls or boardwalk girders that suggestively accentuate her imprisonment...

...McCarthy hesitates as she recalls it, unsure when treading eloquent ground...

...Passion that never fades...

...But while superficially accurate, all this would mislead viewers about the ultimate content of the film...

...as writer, editor, and co-producer of Mer-maids she ought to win an all-Cinema award for equal-ing her energy with intelligence...

...Gabrielle is also everything Polly isn't: tall, blond, elegant, assured, ambitious — and infectious...

...Torn does well as a villain less loud and savage than his usual redneck tough, but little is written to challenge him...

...Did he think, along with most directors raised in Hollywood these days, that comedy can't have it...

...Mermaids concerns Polly, a ditzy thirty-one-year-old, red-haired part-time secretary (Sheila McCarthy), aimless but free-spirited, given to roaming Toronto taking quirky photos of people on the streets...

...She was a fairy tale," Polly lyricizes, falling deeply into platonic love with her boss...

...Her film has a playful but sure touch with "heavy" subjects such as Romanticism, femininity, lesbianism, and art...

...Added variety is provided by interspersing fantasy sequences in black and white...

...Wish You Were Here is a bittersweet woman's coming-of-age tale set in seaside Britain in the 1950s...

...But in private she talks differently, and in her best moment, drunk at her own birthday party, tells Polly of her real ambitions in a language so pure, so simple, it redeems its own grand cliches...

...Bitingly amusing, especially in one scene with a psychiatrist, she has a silly, sulky way with crossing her eyes that makes one want to forgive the cliches of the plot and her role...

...It would be a refreshing dissent from hidebound convention to see a film that placed this at the heart of a "young person's" growth...

...Leland also uses cinematography (Ian Wilson) to portray this world's dirty gray boredom and the bright spirit of Linda (Emily Lloyd), a cheeky sixteen-year-old seeking both personal and sexual attention...

...She may have also missed a beat in titling the Curator's collection "the Church Gallery...

...Where one hopes, desperately, for a romantic poem from this elegant bad guy, the director shapes a void...

...It starts with casting...

...The acting carries the film over some dangerous territory...

...Film critics judge the char-acters in this kind of movie on a simple basis: anyone given to cursing and crudity is good, anyone who believes in decorum and a steady job is bad...

...in these, Polly imagines herself as a modern Superwoman flying through the air, or, in the title sequence, as a mature sophisticate in Victorian dress elegantly picnicking at a beach where she hears the title's sirens...

...The variations in film stock, in short, are not mere technical games, but expressions of character...

...But Nadine was made by someone capable of much better...

...Andy Warhol's minimalism, or action sensationalism...

...The film has several purely artistic weaknesses — a forced conclusion, an unconvincing fight scene in a tea room in Bournemouth, and Leland's failure to identify Emily's aunt...

...One scene in a salvage yard almost leads to some grand, mock-chivalric...

...The cold here is not from the sea but the heart...

...As he showed in Places, he knows and loves the landscape, and can even write screen hymns to it...

...The main defect involves the ideology that has won Wish 498: Commonweal You Were Here so much praise...

...Her rebellion takes the form of offending her elders with obscene but often witty impropriety...

...Sometimes filmmakers, in different ways, strive to achieve such a state, e.g...

...What does she want of life...

...Bridges performs decently as always, but has little new to offer the overexposed role of a good ole boy with fond illusions about the future of his rundown Bluebonnet Tavern...

...Here is a decent, not great filmmaker, who has never failed to produce something with substance and bite...

...It fits with Rozema's satire on art: technique only derives its strength from a human base...

...The pause incarnates her past in a nutshell...

...One could recount in some detail the succession of scrapes, the suave villain (Rip Torn) who bedevils them, the other woman (Glenne Headly) follow ing Bridges around, and the nostalgia for the early 1950s that dominates the production design...

...it occupies the abandoned nave, and a few pews have been retained to provide seats...

...The usual, I guess...