Get Real.

The able Don Roos's latest movie, Bounce, is being praised for its naturalness, a somewhat curious virtue. A very natural film about bores or crazies would be tiresome. And the ultimate form of cinematic naturalness, improvisation, is a particularly tricky device: Employed sparingly, it has its uses, but too much of it feels, paradoxically, less natural than a scripted scene. And why not? Actors, after all, are not writers.

Bounce, I am sorry to say, comes across as one big improvisation. Ben Affleck plays Buddy Amaral, a smooth ad-agency guy with a big drinking problem. He has brought in the lucrative Infinity Airline account to his agency, of which he owns 20 percent. Returning to Los Angeles, he is delayed in Chicago by a snowstorm. At O'Hare airport, he meets Mimi, an attractive young Dallas businesswoman who is talking to Greg Janello (the good Tony Goldwyn), a young writer eager to return to his family in L.A. They have a pleasant three-way conversation, and Mimi (the toothsome Natasha Henstridge) evinces some interest in Buddy.

Sensing that she would sleep with him, he gives his ticket for an earlier flight on Infinity to Greg, and the ticket-taking stewardess, a sometime playmate of Buddy's, is willing to let a Janello fly with an Amaral boarding pass. But since when must ticket-holders identify themselves as they board? Amazing things go on in natural-feeling movies.

The plane crashes, killing 200-odd people, including Greg, driving the deeply upset Buddy off the wagon and ultimately into rehab. Meanwhile, Greg's wife, Abby (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has two darling boys and a wise mother, is shaken out of her complacent belief that Greg was not on that plane. She goes briefly to pieces in a medium-long shot that has been much lauded for not milking the tragedy in the interest of, you guessed it, greater naturalness.

Eventually, Buddy is impelled to seek out the young woman he widowed. Abby is now a novice realtor, and he pretends interest in an apartment she is awkwardly showing. In the process, he gets his pants ripped by her Rottweiler, also named Buddy, in a meeting-cute scene, a throwback to the old prenatural movies. She offers to pay for the pants, which Buddy (the guy) gallantly refuses, and gets her the very remunerative assignment of negotiating the $1.8 million deal in which Buddy's agency acquires larger quarters.

Abby pretends to be a divorcee rather than a widow (she doesn't want to be pitied), while Buddy pretends never to have met Greg. As the screenplay sees it, these are guilty maneuvers that the future lovers-for that, naturally, is what Abby and Buddy become-will have to dearly expiate. Yet what are these white lies compared to the lie of the phony naturalness? Affleck and Paltrow, former lovers in real life, strain stalwartly to convey complex, conflicting emotions. Affleck's eyes tear up, and his mouth contorts into asymmetry. The tremulous Miss Paltrow palpitates, sheds copious tears, and her heaving bosom virtually implodes. All, of course, in the interest of naturalness that nevertheless emerges faintly stilted.

But what can you expect from people who don't know what dooryard means? Early on, Greg quotes Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," and, in a kind of chain reaction, every major character confesses over the course of the picture not to know the meaning of dooryard. That, I guess, is natural ignorance.

--- The French, who have words for so much, do not have one (or two) for "soap opera," for the good reason that they don't produce any. But they do import them for television, and they themselves make movies that are in essence condensed soap operas for mature audiences. La Buche (The Log or, in this case, The Christmas Log) is such a one.

It concerns three sisters of Russian-Jewish origin on the paternal side. Louba, at 42 the eldest, sings in a Russian cabaret, gives Russian lessons, and lives with her father, Stanislas, a divorced, retired club violinist and former ardent womanizer. We do not see Louba giving Russian lessons, which is a pity, and see too much of her (dubbed) singing, which is a mistake. But we do get a nice sense of her emotional personality, her interaction with her father, whom she looks after, and her twelve-year love affair with a married realtor, Gilbert, who says he cannot live without her but cannot give up his children. Their trysts take place drolly in the fancy apartments he peddles.

Sonia, the middle sister, has married a rich stockbroker who cheats on her, but allows her to be a comfortable mother and hostess. She gives the annual Christmas party for the extended family, for which she prepares for months. Milla, the youngest, is said to be the most talented, though we never find out just what she does, or why she has no boyfriend. But she whizzes about sassily on her motorcycle, the helmet making her look like an Amazon warrior.

The film starts with Christmas songs and crowds of shoppers in the stores: It is December 22. Suddenly, we cut to a funeral. The sisters' mother, Yvette, has lost her second husband, a classical violinist. As the coffin is lowered, a cell phone rings. The mourners all check their phones, but it turns out to be that of the deceased, in his coffin. The caller is the dead man's first wife, Janine, whom no one has notified. Comments Yvette: "She will find out when her battery runs out." Such is the movie's antic humor: funny, but not quite believable.

Stanislas, in poor health, would skip the Christmas dinner to avoid Yvette. He plans to spend Christmas Eve with his young tenant, Joseph, who lives in the annex where Stanislas used to practice the violin. Joseph is an unemployed gaffer who fixes Stanislas's leaky pipes (poorly) and makes toys for his five-year-old daughter, who lives in the provinces with her remarried mother. Sonia's husband and Gilbert's wife are barely noticed, but Joseph's Annabelle, whose second marriage is failing, gets a fine hysterical scene.

As you may have guessed, this is a woman's picture, the first to be directed by the prominent screenwriter Daniele Thompson (La Reine Margot), who co-wrote it with her handsome son Christopher, who also moodily plays Joseph. The story is loosely derived from the writer-director's family history. It is a quaint mixture of genuinely funny or touching situations, and others a bit too convoluted, not to say contrived. Miss Thompson is good about what she leaves out, though some of her characters would profit from fuller elaboration.

Still, just as the days hurtle toward Christmas, the characters undergo various shocks (Louba is pregnant, Stanislas has a heart attack), and a lot about the past rises to the surface. It is all reasonably interesting, but piled on just thick enough to evoke that soap-opera feeling. Yet there is redemption in the casting and direction. We get some remarkably apt and appealing performers in fine Gallic fettle. Sabine Azema (Louba), Emmanuelle Beart (Sonia), and Charlotte Gainsbourg (Milla) are eye candy, Claude Rich (Stanislas) is still an old charmer, and Jean-Pierre Darroussin (Gilbert) looks pleasantly homely.

But for those who know French cinema (and even for those who don't), the film movingly unites two legendary beauties of bygone years: Francoise Fabian as Yvette, and Francoise Brion as Janine. When these two still-fetching Francoises share a brief scene at their husband's grave, and we note their valiantly Pyrrhic victory, aided by face lifts, over time, something in our hearts resonates as strongly as if La Buche were a supreme work of art.