Prelude to a Kiss.

FANTASY is a tricky genre. It lends itself to conveying messages from inside what appears to be mere escapist fluff. But it is also susceptible of overinterpretation, symbol hunting, projection (psychological, not cinematic) when escapist fluff is all there is. And there is a third possibility, as in Prelude to a Kiss, where a hidden agenda gratifies an in-group while eluding the uninitiated. You might call it subliminal subversion.

Prelude to a Kiss, written by Craig Lucas and directed by Norman Rene, began as an off-Broadway hit, was transferred to Broadway on the basis of Frank Rich's glowing review in the New York Times, and is now brought to the screen by the original team. Lucas and Rene had previously joined forces on Longtime Companion, a dubious film about A/DS in which people died rather too prettily, and the quick and the dead were eventually reunited in a rose-colored fantasy in the manner of an equally factitious heterosexual dud, Places in the Heart. Prelude to a Kiss, a faithful adaptation of the play, has a homosexual subtext kept deliberately elusive.

The story begins with the lightning love affair of two lovable yuppies: Peter, an editor in microfiche publishing, and Rita, who tends bar while aiming to become a graphics designer. The dialogue calls attention to the interchangeability of their names, sometimes pronounced Peter and Reeter, sometimes Pita and Rita. Something, too, is made of their similar tastes in food and drink.

They meet at a dance; soon Peter calls on Rita at her job, where their bar conversation is insufferably cute. He proposes marriage half-jokingly; half-seriously, she accepts. She invites him to her apartment; he makes sexually suggestive sweet-talk in Dutch, for he has spent ten years in polymorphously perverse Amsterdam. In Rita's pad, they become even cuter, though the "talking dirty" sequence from the play is cut. Rita coaxes out of Peter one of his favorite kinky-sex fantasies and eagerly agrees to oblige. Significantly, Meg Ryan never shows any flesh, whereas Alec Baldwin's bare torso, bedizened with something like a dark bearskin rug cunningly teased into tonsorial art worthy of Vidal Sassoon, is one of the camera's chief delectations, repeatedly lingered over.

In no time Rita takes Peter to meet her parents in suburbia. (The play's locale was New York; the film, presumably for greater grass-roots appeal, uses Chicago.) They are duly charmed. Soon there is an idyllic wedding on their Lake Forest lawn, smack against the waters of Lake Michigan, which Norman Rene and the currently In cinematographer, Stefan Czapsky (of Batman Returns, and others), shoot as if it were a painted cobalt backdrop. (Perhaps it was.) A strange old man, whom nobody invited or knows, comes up to kiss the bride. (The movie earlier showed us his grubby home life with his lower-class daughter and son-inlaw, which sadly demystifies him.) At the kiss, there is a gust of wind, a change in the light, a sudden falling of leaves. The kissers have exchanged souls. Rita, in the dying Old Man's body, slinks back to the blue-collar home; the Old Man, frolicking in Rita's frame, is off with Peter on a Jamaican honeymoon.

Peter, having figured out what happened, becomes frantic; the pseudo-Rita, in a huff, goes back to "her" parents in suburbia. Peter haunts Rita's former bar, and there discovers the Old Man (Rita), in a scene that, for the Times's Vincent Canby, enriched, in the stage version, everything before and after it: "It was the heart of the matter .... a love so rare and profound that it transcends physical decay and imminent loss. Not incidentally, it was also a poignant reflection on the trials of love in the era of AIDS." This is, essentially, the Frank Rich interpretation; Lucas and Rene have spoken of the immateriality of the body, where only soul matters. Forget all this. The point is not the Old Man's lung cancer or AIDS or the transmigration of souls, but that Rita has been transmogrified into a man, and that a heterosexual love must adapt to homosexuality. We see Peter and the Old Man hug, kiss, and keep house together; but, we are told, they do not make love. That would give away the show. For everything in the film works to obliterate the difference between the sexes. Peter's "dirty" fantasy involves "someone . . . who might just happen to be around the apartment," etc. --strictly non-gender-specific. Elsewhere, Peter extols his love partner's (mark the choice of words) "soft, dark, wet whatever." Or take this bit of dialogue between Peter and the OldManified Rita: "OLD MAN: Does he know you know? PETER: Does he? Yes. OLD MAN: She. PETER: Whoever. Yes, I think, yes, she does." The melting together of pronouns and genders is total. Later, the Ritaized Old Man explains how it all began: "I wish I were that young groom starting out. Or the bride, for that matter. I'll kiss the bride. I'll be the bride." What heterosexual male wants to be the bride?

My point isn't that Prelude to a Kiss doesn't have the right to be homosexual propaganda; only that it has no right to do this in the guise of a heterosexual love story. And it does not help that the writing is chichi and the direction pedestrian. Even the title, a quotation from a pop song, is inept: what we get is not the prelude, but the postlude to a fateful kiss. Canby goes on: "The same dialogue that served well enough on the stage now sounds arch and coy or metaphysically flat." It sounded just as arch and coy and flat on the stage. The casting, however, was better. Mary-Louise Parkers Rita was sexier, more piquantly strung-out than wholesome Meg Ryan; and Barnard Hughes was a more likable, touching Old Man than Sydney Walker. This made for a more evenly matched emotional tug of war. But it never was anything but junk.

Mr. Simon, NR's film critic, is also theater critic for New York magazine.