REVIEW; '50S INDIA'S CHANGING WORLD CAPTURED IN 'COTTON MARY'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

A sad and sensitive portrait of cultural displacement in newly independent 1950s India, ``Cotton Mary'' may be too specific for some American viewers, but it's an absorbing movie nevertheless.

Directed by Ismail Merchant, who usually does producing duties for the Merchant-Ivory combine, it's certainly the India-born filmmaker's best helming job to date. Although he still has a long way to go before matching James Ivory's best (``A Room With a View,'' ''Howards End''), Merchant exhibits a narrative clarity and a sure understanding of complex emotions that was previously absent in his directing work.

Merchant also creates the kind of convincing sense of place and time we've come to expect from his company's movies. And in Madhur Jaffrey, the London-based Indian actress who has appeared in four previous MI films, he has given a world-class performer the role of her life.

Jaffrey's Cotton Mary, so named for her preference for wearing clothes made of British fabric, is a nurse of Anglo-Indian ancestry living on the subcontinent's tropical Malabar Coast. She works in a hospital recently run by the departed Raj and fancies herself more English than Indian, though she tends to practice both Christian and Hindu rituals and eats with her fingers when nobody's watching.

Mary's best shot at realizing her dream of being a fine lady comes when a troubled leftover of the fading European gentry, Greta Scacchi's Lily Macintosh, gives premature birth to a child she cannot feed. Mary secretly spirits the dying infant across the canal to her wheelchair- dependent, wet-nurse sister Blossom (Neena Gupta), who lives in a downscale alms house. Mary uses her ``magical'' baby-saving abilities to insinuate herself into Lily's household, which the somewhat demented new domestic immediately sets to taking over.

And with relative ease, since Lily is distracted by a whole lot of personal problems. Not only has much of the community she grew up in moved back to Mother England, but her husband, John - a constantly traveling BBC correspondent played with caddish detachment by James Wilby - clearly could not care less about her or his family's problems. Between the resulting sense of overwhelming isolation and guilt over her lacking lactation, deeply depressed Lily is an easy mark for Mary's increasingly Machiavellian machinations.

But the new servant does not have an entirely easy go of it. Her beautiful niece Rosie (Sakina Jaffrey, Madhur's real-life daughter) has her sights set on the eminently attainable John. Lily's remaining British friends will have nothing of Mary's delusions that she's their equal. On the other side of that ethnic mirror, her own half-caste circle grows increasingly fed up with Mary's pretentious airs, not to mention her growing body of lies.

Through all of this, the elder Jaffrey charts the crumbling of a manipulative mind in superb detail, making her Mary alternately frightening, despicable, pitiful and very much the victim of awful social forces beyond her grasping control. It's to Merchant's credit that even with such a charismatic central performance dominating the film, the highly symbolic roles of Lily and John evoke all their end-of-the-Empire resonances while still painting a very real picture of an empty marriage.

The facts

--The film: ``Cotton Mary'' (R; nudity).

--The stars: Madhur Jaffrey, Greta Scacchi, James Wilby, Sakina Jaffrey, Neena Gupta.

--Behind the scenes: Directed by Ismail Merchant. Written by Alexandra Viets. Produced by Nayeem Hafizka and Richard Hawley. Released by Artistic License.

--Running time: Two hours, five minutes.

--Playing: Colorado, Pasadena; Monica, Santa Monica 

--Our rating: Three stars.

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Photo: Madhur Jaffrey is an Anglo-Indian nurse intent on improving her societal standing in Ismail Merchant's ``Cotton Mary.''