Everything's coming up Rozema.

Patricia Rozema hits new heights with her bold film version of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park 

Canadian filmmaker Patricia Rozema is understandably euphoric about the past year. With Mansfield Park, her gutsy Miramax-backed adaptation of the Jane Austen novel, the screenwriter and director has drawn positive reviews and stirred up a brouhaha among Austen purists. What's more, the movie is introducing her name (pronounced ROSE-ah-ma) to mainstream audiences worldwide.

"I feel the sensation of achieving something I've been trying to achieve for a long time," says the director of the sensual lesbian love story When Night Is Falling. Apparently the suits at Miramax agree, having just signed Rozema for an additional two-picture deal.

But the wrap on 1999 couldn't be more different from the year's beginning. Twelve months ago Rozema was still fending off a near-fatal bout of meningitis--a fight that included emergency spinal taps and a quarantine. "It felt like a truck ran into me," she recalls. "It was all over in a week. You either die from it, or you get over it."

From meningitis to Miramax, Rozema concedes, it's been a year of extremes--"a startling, pleasant, terrifying, and thrilling time." All those moods surface in Mansfield Park, an audacious period adaptation that marks a real departure for the 41-year-old filmmaker, who's known primarily for contemporary same-sex love stories. Rozema acknowledges being a bit daunted about taking on a novel by the mighty Austen--but not too daunted. "Sure, she's one of the great writers of the English language," Rozema says. "But I was free to do anything I wanted with it, and that was attractive."

Much to the dismay of some Austenphiles, Rozema fused Mansfield Park with bits and pieces of Austen's autobiographical writings--and laid bare what the director feels were lesbian overtones. The result is an elegant, romantic piece that's equal parts Austen and Rozema, with the filmmaker's hand felt throughout.

In offering Rozema the reins, Miramax mogul Harvey Weinstein was renewing a successful partnership. Rozema's 1987 feature debut, I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, was one of the first films Miramax ever distributed, and the two had often discussed working together again. "This was just like going home," Rozema recalls. "We've been dancing around different projects for years."

After Mermaids, her low-budget gem about an awkward young woman's crush on a chic gallery owner, garnered international acclaim, the young auteur took a fall with White Room. The experimental 1990 feature starring Margot Kidder left both audiences and critics frigid. But Rozema heated up the screen once more with When Night Is Falling, an explicit, deliciously shot film about one woman's break with the confines of her Calvinist church as she embraces a lesbian love. In 1997 Rozema branched out to television--and won an Emmy for her short feature, Bach Cello Suite #6: Six Gestures, made in collaboration with celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma.

Despite the personal nature of her films, Rozema has always remained decidedly protective of her private life. Four years ago she gave birth to a daughter, but she declines to discuss any details of what she calls "family matters."

Rozema is more willing to talk about her girlfriend, Lesley Barber, since the two are also artistic collaborators--Barber composed the music for Mansfield Park and When Night Is Falling. "Her agent sent me a tape of her work," Rozema recalls. "I listened to it for a couple of years before actually meeting her. Then we were interviewing people for When Night Is Falling. There was an immediate connection." Working with Barber, Rozema says, is "great. It helps that she's absolutely brilliant."

In her dealings with the media, Rozema has often seemed to dance around the lesbian label. In 1995 she almost declined an interview with The Advocate even though When Night Is Falling was her most explicitly lesbian work to date. "I haven't come out as a lesbian; I'm deliberately vague," she said at the time.

Now she's more forthright. "I'm homosexual, you know that," she says. "But it's not the definitive definition of my work and my life. It's tough, because you want each of your works to be seen in a new way each time."

Will she return to lesbian themes in her next two outings for Miramax? Rozema hasn't decided. For now she's enjoying all kinds of possibilities. "I feel calm and confident," she says. "Creatively, this is an extremely exciting time for me."