Sommersby.

Why the perennial obsession with updating stories? Why turn the she-wolf of Romulus and Remus into a prize-winning Irish wolfhound at yesterday's dog show? It is much easier for a true artist to transport us to his time than for us, his less gifted interpreters, to drag him to a time and place he did not envisage. The true story of Martin Guerre perfectly fitted, and discomfited, medieval France, and needed only the scrupulous retelling it got in Daniel Vigne's Le Retour de Martin Guerre.

Martin, a young boy in Artigat, at the foot of the Pyrenees, was married off to the even younger Bertrande, two greedy peasant families thus pooling their lands and wanting prompt progeny to cultivate them. For seven years, though, Martin would not cohabit with his wife; finally he did, then bolted and vanished. Eight years later a man came back claiming to be Guerre; although some things, such as his shoe size, were wrong, he knew everything about the villagers, his family, his wife. He won them over in that order, and spent three happy years begetting children and increasing the property. Then an uncle sued him, with Bertrande as co-plaintiff. Two trials ensued, and Martin nearly won - until the real Martin showed up. There was a confession, a public apology, and a hanging right outside the conjugal habitation.

All great impostures fascinate, but this one even more so because of the ambiguous position of the wife. Can a spouse be thus hoodwinked? Or was it collusion? But then why, after three years of connubial bliss, would she reverse herself? And how could the false Martin have learned all about the villagers, even Bertrande's most closely guarded secrets? Yet all this can be made believable in its medieval setting, and in the shadow of the gallows. Transpose it to post-Civil War America as Sommersby, with Jack Sommersby, the brutish Kentucky landowner returning after eight years of war and captivity, and a lot of things no longer make a modicum of sense.

There were photographs by then, and written records and handwriting analysis, and the hangman's noose was no longer quite so Damoclean. To justify the broad outlines of the old story, complicated and confusing additions had to be introduced, notably an irrelevant murder. And can we believe a black judge in a Southern court at the very beginning of Reconstruction? Or that the new, mild, and loving Jack Sommersby would convert the valley from wheat to tobacco, and give former black slaves the same property rights as the white farmers? Or that neither Jack nor anyone else would know how to deal with the pests attacking the tobacco crop - except for the very obstinate suitor of Laurel Sommersby, formerly presumed to be a widow? And much more that's incredible in Nicholas Meyer and Sarah Kernochan's script, which besides straining credulity deflects attention from the central drama.

Deflecting, too, is the performance of Richard Gere, who comes across as a most anachronistic Jack. The actor has a certain contemporary cuteness or swagger or snottiness; he seems to know exactly where the camera is, how to present his most flattering angle to it, and how to throw away lines with consummately laid-back nonchalance. Something about this man is fishy; not because he isn't Jack Sommersby, but because he is Richard Gere. He may kill his little boy's dog (because the dog has sniffed out the truth), but he buys the child an even better puppy, and is himself as playful, whimsical, and adorable as any pup. Or it may be simply Gere's eyes: those small, shifty orbs, ever ready, if the sailing gets rough, to jump ship.

Jodie Foster, conversely, is a totally credible Laurel. Disarmingly straight-forward, she seems to summon up every response by the shortest route from the core of her being - no detours, no deviations anywhere. Finally, though, the screenplay lets her down; it is too contrived, too shoddy to contain her excellence, and ends up dragging everything else down, too, including Jon Amiel's amiable direction. Only the camera of Philippe Rousselot keeps shooting the various Virginia locations with cool loveliness, and the indoor scenes with a cozy Rembrandtesque burnish, so that you believe everything you see, except the plot.

* Love Field is such a patently cooked-up piece of goods that it need not detain us long. It concerns Lurene Hallett (Michelle Pfeiffer), a housewife from a Southern marital hell, who, to escape the callous reality of her husband, fantasizes about being gorgeous Jackie Kennedy, madly in love with scrumptious JFK. Although she clings to her platinum-blond hair, in every other way Lurene makes herself into a Jacqueline clone.

On November 22, 1963, Lurene drives to Dallas to catch a glimpse of Jackie and JFK arriving at the airport, named (to delight any film and double-entendre-maker) Love Field. After the assassination, Lurene impetuously decides to bus it up to Washington and the funeral. On the bus, she meets a black man, Paul, en route to Philadelphia with his six-year-old daughter, Jonell. The dazed little girl never speaks, and the father, too, seems to have some sort of guilty secret. Still, a friendship develops among these three as they travel from the improbable to the preposterous.

This is one of those movies whose endings - repellently - are written by the public. Several different conclusions were tried out on audiences until they chose what must surely have been the least believable of the lot. The writer is Don Roos, who also gave us the sleazy Single White Female; the director, Jonathan Kaplan, whose most recent credits (or debits) are Unlawful Entry and Immediate Family. Dennis Haysbert, who plays Paul, was not the filmmakers' first choice, and I can see why: his performance is bland and unidiosyncratic - in fact, dull.

But there is Michelle Pfeiffer, and, speaking as no particular fan of hers, I nevertheless have to declare her Lurene a triumph. It's not all that easy to play a silly, confused, plebeian woman and make her thoroughly likable without cheating - without, that is, embellishing her into something better than she is. Yet this appears to be Miss Pfeiffer's strong suit, as also in Married to the Mob and Frankie and Johnny, rather than in her more highly touted femme-fatale parts. Be that as it may, this Lurene is a fully rounded, humanized, and endearing creation; Miss Pfeiffer makes you forget that neither the character nor the movie makes any sense. There is also a nice supporting performance from Louise Latham, and soigne camera work from Ralph Bode. And a little wide-eyed black girl (Stephanie McFadden) acting scared cannot leave anyone's heartstrings untremulous.

* When actors write and direct their own movies (or plays), disaster is usually but a step or two away. What emerges almost invariably is a set of acting exercises loosely strung together, their main purpose being to give the actors a chance to emote, emote, EMOTE. Any trumped-up reason is as good as another, and the camera need do little more than some stalking, swooping, and cozying up to the (often improvising) thespians in their labor of self-love. Such is the case with Mac, co-written (with Brandon Cole) and directed by its leading actor, John Turturro.

Turturro, with his common, indeed coarse, face and ability to go from bewildered to furibund in a twinkling, has been a perfect interpreter of the - generally Italo-American - everyman, sometimes put-upon and pathetic, more often defiant and even vicious. At that sort of thing he has few rivals, but it needs to have strong directorial reins controlling it, rather than be given a free hand to keep slapping us in the face with.

What story there is concerns three brothers, all construction workers: Mac, whose perfectionism, learned from his father, at whose wake the movie begins, makes him run afoul of the crass Polish contractor, unsubtly named Polowski; Vico, who sees himself as a ladies' man but is, in fact, a lazy, time-serving beer-guzzler; and Bruno, the sensitive youngest brother, the first in the family to go to college, who gets involved with a fancy artists' model, Oona, a free spirit. Although one divines autobiographical elements here (Bruno + Mac = John Turturro), everything about the film is hopelessly cliche, except perhaps the zany Oona, a somewhat more hopeful cliche belonging in a different movie.

None of the brothers achieves a tangy, tangible individuality; the father - even when his corpse comes momentarily alive at the wake - is a stereotype; the mother, whom we never see, only hear as a griping and needling off-screen voice, is a gimmick. Polowski, the heavy, remains even in the deft hands of Olek Krupa another stereotype. Turturro, Michael Badalucco, and Carl Capotorto, as the brothers, fight with, support, betray, and love one another according to the time-dishonored conventions of the genre. Turturro ends up alone, running his own honorable but struggling business, sustained only by his devoted wife, played by Katherine Borowitz, his real-life spouse, and arguably the only woman who can match him in unprepossessingness.

Which makes one reflect wistfully about the wisdom of those phony old Hollywood movies where equally jerrybuilt stories and clapboard characters were blessed with improbably good-looking actors and actresses: at least it gave you something to look at. To watch handsome people make love on screen can be justified as an aesthetic experience; to watch two such scarecrows as these makes you feel ashamed of yourself: it must be voyeurism of the lowest grade, about as erotic as observing livestock mating on the farm. Ellen Barkin makes Oona even more absurd than written - or perhaps just as absurd, which is quite enough. Needless to say, there is also a noble black construction worker (John Amos), who falls off the roof owing to Vico's carelessness, but takes it philosophically in his stride - or lack of stride - while being showered with collections from his colleagues.

* If Mac errs on the side of unsightliness, Indochine revels in every kind of beauty and banal didacticism by way of a plot. The story attempts to be an allegorical representation of the French presence in Indochina, with Catherine Deneuve as Eliane, a beautiful, passionate, ruthless, opium-smoking, but ultimately vulnerable and touching rubber-plantation owner; her lovely native ward, Camille, who ends up as a heroic freedom fighter; Camille's promised husband, Tanh, who turns into a mighty Communist rebel leader; Jean-Baptiste, the almost equally rebellious French naval officer, who becomes the lover of both Eliane and Camille; and Asselin, the chief law enforcer in Saigon, obnoxiously obsessed with Eliane.

The 155-minute film, directed by Regis Wargnier, and written by himself and three other shlockmasters (including one shlockmistress), has all the hallmarks of those thick paperback adventure novels leaving no bodice unripped or corn unreaped. The lurking allegory makes it all the more lurid, and though most of the actors look gorgeous, only the homely Jean Yanne, as Asselin, really acts. Catherine Deneuve proves yet again that stunning looks can make poor acting in movies look as excusable as justifiable homicide; at that, her underacting is better than the overacting of Vincent Perez as the mother-and-daughter-lover. The authentic scenery (Vietnam, Malaysia, Switzerland) and cinematography (Francois Catonne) are spectacular, and, if you can edit out the plot, you can enjoy a ravishing, albeit overlong, documentary.