PRISONERS OF LOVE : 'Bridget Jones's Diary' & 'The Widow of Saint-Pierre'.

I lived in Germany for several years, and it almost destroyed me for romantic comedy. I can remember sitting in a kino, gnashing my teeth at the scene in Schlaflos in Seattle where Meg Ryan and Rosie O'Donnell get teary-eyed retelling the plot of the Cary Grant movie, An Affair to Remember. What was wrong with Americans? Why did we have to make everything so cute, so smiley-happy-weepy?

Too much Wim Wenders will do this to you.

Back again stateside, I landed amid the late-nineties romantic comedy boom, gnashing my way through You've Got Mail and Notting Hill and My Best Friend's Wedding, until it seemed I might never again smile in delight at the innocence of a kiss. But now comes Bridget Jones and her diary. The movie, if you haven't heard, chronicles a year in the life of a thirty-two-year-old London publishing house underling, taking up her daily worries about her weight, her love life, her weight, her job, her weight--and the great, overarching fear of remaining eternally single and unloved. Like the novel it is based on, a bit of friendly fluff by Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary plays with Pride and Prejudice--riffing on Jane Austen's famous opening lines, and distracting Bridget with a handsome bounder, Daniel, while awkward, proud Mark Darcy (get it?)--lingers in the background. Will Bridget (Renee Zellweger) can the cad and snatch the catch instead? Guess.

Bridget Jones's Diary isn't just a romantic comedy, but one specially pitched to women ("Total chick flick," a guy in the theater lobby commented), and its mammoth appeal lies in the shrewd decision to serve up not just romance, but a detailed anatomy of "The Bad Day." Bridget endures the nightmare of hideous clothes ("Great," she says, after borrowing a dress from her mother for a party, "I was wearing a carpet.") She suffers through the world's worst hair day. The boss from hell. And on and on. Panic and mortification lurk in every social situation. What do you say at a high-powered publishing party when suddenly you find yourself in conversation with Salman Rushdie? Or when you're the only one to show up to a costume party unaware that the "vicars and tarts" theme has been--oops!--canceled? Director Sharon Maguire brings a comic exaggeration to a young(ish) woman's trials, and to her triumphs too: like telling the jerk you work for exactly what you think of him, then walking off the job; or finally finding a man who looks you in the eyes and says, "I like you--just as you are." That may not be Cary Grant dialogue, but it sure sends a sigh through the audience.

While Bridget Jones's Diary--the novel--bogged down in its heroine's appalling self-absorption, the movie makes Bridget likable, indeed lovable (that's the point, after all), and does so through the very shamelessness of its romantic gambits. It's playful about what it's doing to us, the soundtrack most of all: Bridget preparing for a big date, shaving her legs to Mission Impossible-esque music, or sitting at home alone, drowning her sorrows in red wine and singing along in weepy defiance to Eric Carmen's gooey seventies pop tune, "All by Myself." It might be scary to see how fully pop culture shapes Bridget's dilemmas, moods, and sense of self (she panics while watching Glenn Close's psychotic-because-unmarried performance in Fatal Attraction)--scary, if it weren't so funny.

Bridget Jones's Diary won't rock your world, but it might shake it a little, with laughter. There are hilarious scenes, one involving a public-speaking meltdown (Bridget's), another with her two suitors duking it out, showcasing the hilarious spectacle of Oxbridge street-brawling. Hugh Grant is terrific as Bridget's womanizing boss--incorrigibly witty, casually cynical, his cadaverous good looks hinting at a Dorian Gray-like corruption within. As for Zellweger, doing an English accent (almost Streep-like in its quality, by the way) frees her up, letting her be louder than usual, and less controlled. Bridget drinks too much, and smokes too much, and eats too much; and Zellweger (who gained twenty-five pounds to do the role, which amounts to moral courage for an actress in Hollywood these days) looks the part, doughy and flushed and sloppy. Best of all, she conveys how deeply in the emotion of the moment Bridget is--way up when something goes well, crashing when it doesn't, winning our tender affection. Here's a woman who, while visiting her parents, buttons up flannel PJs and announces, "I'm going to Bedfordshire." Meg Ryan says that line, and I wince. Renee Zellweger says it, and I'm all hers. Go figure.

The Widow of Saint-Pierre is the latest from French director Patrice Leconte, a gloomy, muted piece of work that looks like penance for his having committed the spry comedy of last year's The Girl on the Bridge. The film is set in 1850, in a remote French territory off the coast of Newfoundland, where two fishermen take part in a drunken and pointless tavern killing that results in a death sentence for one of them, Neel Auguste (Emir Kusturica). There's no guillotine in the settlement, however; one has to be sent for from Paris. Meanwhile, the condemned man's rehabilitation is championed by a do-gooding blue-blood couple--the captain of the regiment, Jean (Daniel Auteuil), and his wife Pauline, known as Madame La (Juliette Binoche). Madame La drafts Neel to help build a greenhouse garden; the effort expands to fixing people's houses, and bit by bit Neel becomes a popular figure in the town, his impending execution pitting the populace, led by the eccentric Madame La, against a governor and magistrates bent on "justice."

The movie raises the moral problem of executing a man who has reformed himself, and the populist uprising ("No guillotine on Saint-Pierre!") lends a political gloss. But Leconte's main interest lies in the curious triangle involving prisoner, benefactress, and husband. "She is governed by her passions," the captain says, defending his wife's behavior. Madame La also seems inflamed sexually by Neel, and her arousal in turn erotically charges her relations with her husband, making the two of them the object of envious tea-parlor gossip. ("We can't all have a convict around to arouse our men's flagging interest," one woman complains.)

Widow's far-north setting is forbiddingly barren, all fog and ice and stone buildings, and the film has a muted, grayed-out look, like a barely colorized photograph--the flowers Madame La and Neel cultivate, and the passions they engender, bringing heat and color to a wintry world. These frail flowers are doomed to die. Widow has the plotting of tragedy, and the look, too (there's a gorgeous, Dureresque image of Neel Auguste's hands sticking out between the bars of his cell, with Binoche kissing them). But characters' motives are left way too obscure. The captain and Madame La wonder why Neel doesn't crave his freedom. The governor and his cronies wonder why the captain can't, or won't, rein in his wife. The gossips at the cafe wonder who's sleeping with whom. Fate-sealing decisions are taken, and no one--we least of all--understands why. The Widow of Saint-Pierre is based on nineteenth-century court documents, and that's exactly how it feels, a bare-bones chronicle Leconte tries to deepen with slow, somber shots of Madame La staring out the window looking pensive, or the Captain, holding a flower, closing his eyes and inhaling with an aesthete's brooding thrill. Auteuil and Binoche give it their best, but their parts are badly underwritten; there's so little to connect the points of Madame La's impulsive actions that she comes off as bizarre, her passion and compassion swirling together in a weird, panting charity.

There are political-historical ironies here: aristocratic noblesse oblige posed against the bloodless cynicism of the magistrates, with their Second Republic anxiety over working-class radicalism; or the death sentence hanging over the republic itself, which within a year will be crushed and replaced by Louis Napoleon's Second Empire. But supplying these elements doesn't solve Leconte's problem. I kept thinking of Daniel Vigne's wonderful 1982 film, The Return of Martin Guerre, which managed to give a skeletal courtroom chronicle the flesh of human drama, while providing a tantalizing glimpse into the mindset of an historical era. The Widow of Saint-Pierre doesn't live up to its own visual power; there's so little emotional impact that the destinies plotted out become mere lines of force, tragedy's contours without its content.

A closing note: Though the two movies under review couldn't be more dissimilar, Leconte's film contains the following line: "I love you for what you are--I wouldn't change a thing." Widow portrays a time when no man would say this unless, and until, he was being led to the firing squad. Which, depending how you see things, is either a tragedy or comedy all its own.