'SEPTEMBER 11' GREATER THAN SUM OF ITS PARTS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

MADE SOON AFTER the 2001 terrorist attacks, ``September 11'' builds an interesting, if not uniformly very good historical artifact out of a pretty kitschy premise.

French producer Alain Brigand had the idea of asking internationally known directors from 11 different countries to make short films that expressed their personal - and, by extension, their cultures' - reactions to the cataclysmic events. The kitsch part was that each segment be timed to the European rendering of the date: 11 minutes, nine seconds and one frame in length.

This has naturally resulted in some of the lamer ideas going on for too long - and the sense that smarter or more informative narratives have been truncated. It also gets you checking your watch during each segment, surely just the opposite effect that the filmmakers' efforts to humanize and understand the incomprehensible were intended to have.

The collective effect is interesting, if only sporadically enlightening. The best story is Idrissa Ouedraogo's wry charmer about a gang of poor African schoolboys who convince themselves that a tall Arab they've seen around is Osama bin Laden and set about to kidnap him for reward money.

For sheer, withering formalism, the prize goes to Mexico's Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (``Amores Perros''), who conducts a cacophony of chants, radio reports and final cell phone calls against a mostly black screen, rent by quick cuts of bodies falling from the twin towers. At the segment's whiteout climax, the Arabic koan ``Does God's light guide us or blind us?'' appears.

Descending from there, quality-wise, we get aged Japanese weirdo Shohei Imamura's somewhat strained parable about a World War II infantryman who comes home acting like a snake; India's Mira Nair's truth-based story about the unknown fate of a Pakistani-American who goes missing on the fateful day; Iranian Samira Makhmalbaf's sweet but slight neorealism about a teacher trying to get her rowdy class of Afghan refugee kids to be quiet for a minute in honor of the dead; Danis Tanovic's (``No Man's Land'') dirgelike story of a Bosnian women's demonstration against war crimes that gets upstaged (or is it made more meaningful?) by international news; and Amos Gitai's re-creation of a car-bombing in Israel that can't get broadcast coverage because of bigger events unfolding in New York.

More controversial - and to their greater detriment, heavy-handed - are the Egyptian and British entries in which, respectively, Youssef Chahine tries to make a case for Palestinian terrorism in a magical realist context, and a Chilean exile recounts for lefty director Ken Loach the horrors that resulted from the September 11, 1973, American-backed coup against his country's elected Allende government.

French romantic Claude Lelouch's bit about a deaf woman in love with a WTC tour guide is the silliest entry, and Sean Penn's thing about Ernest Borgnine's lonely widower and a symbolic houseplant that can't flower until the sun-blocking towers fall is the most head-scratchingly hermetic.

In common, the segments all struggle with the impossible task of putting quick-response perspective onto something as vast and history-changing as 9-11. Of course, this isn't anything that we should ever expect to neatly comprehend, but just as surely better understanding will continue to grow with time. This movie, however, captures and preserves a moment on that long, arduous path, and for that reason alone it was worth the making.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

SEPTEMBER 11 - Three stars

(Not rated: violence, sex, language)

Director: Samira Makhmalbaf, Claude Lelouch, Youssef Chahine, Danis Tanovic, Idrissa Ouedraogo, Ken Loach, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Amos Gitai, Mira Nair, Sean Penn, Shohei Imamura.

Running time: 2 hr. 15 min.

Playing: Nuart, West L.A.

In a nutshell: Eleven short films by international directors of varying gifts and insight present a kaleidoscopic response to the 9-11 terrorist attacks.