TIRED OF U.K. CUTE? BE NOT WARY OF 'ANNIE MARY'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

``VERY ANNIE MARY'' has been tagged as a kind of Welsh ``Full Monty,'' but that's unfair to both films. ``Monty'' was a slicker, cannier, more conventionally entertaining work by far. And ``Very Annie Mary'' is the much, much better movie.

What the two comedies do share is a triumphal plotline involving British eccentrics overcoming their difficulties through some form of putting on a show. But while ``Mary'' takes the eccentricity factor to far greater lengths, it simultaneously manages to give us deeper, richer, more fully imagined characters to get behind. Impossible as it may sound, this film's heart is even more embracing than ``Monty,'' if only because it accepts nasty behavior and severe flaws as part of the human condition.

``Mary'' is also a cockeyed ode to community and, at its core, a serious examination of the ways in which other people's assumptions of what we should want can get in the way of obtaining what we need.

To be frank, though, Sara Sugarman's film requires a degree of patience on the part of the whimsy-resistant. Fortunately, the film's two lead actors, Australia's (and ``Six Feet Under's'') Rachel Griffiths and Wales' own Jonathan Pryce, manage to invest their roles with persuasive humanity at what would otherwise be their most extreme moments of caricature.

Ditto Sugarman and her green-valley setting, with its dotty provincials and song-obsessed Welsh folk. In less-sensitive hands, this all could have come off like one of John Ford's Celtic sideshows. But Sugarman retains a generous view of her yokels' spirits - most evident in the unsentimental portrayal of a cancer-stricken teen-ager, wonderfully portrayed by Joanna Page, who bristles at being the town's designated object of charity. It tends to turn any superficial ethnic stereotyping on its ear.

Jack Pugh (Pryce) is adored by all who reside in the picturesque Gawr Valley for his wonderful bread and, even more so, for the fine Puccini he sings over the loudspeakers of his bakery truck as he makes his delivery rounds. He's usually dressed in full tuxedo and wearing a Pavarotti mask.

But his daughter Annie Mary (Griffiths) knows just what an awful tyrant Jack can really be. Having, as a teen-ager, given up her own singing aspirations to care for her father following her beautiful mother's death, Annie Mary has become a virtual slave to the sanctimonious, priggish and self-adoringly selfish baker.

Jack dominates Annie Mary psychologically, not physically. It's easier because, due to nature or nurture or some mutual conspiracy of genetics and man, she is one awkward muddle of esteem-challenged dorkiness. Lanky, stoop-shouldered and cowed into wearing both her (idealized, of course) grandmother's frocks and her hair in ghastly, Princess Leia side buns, Annie Mary gets lost in a kitchen and galumphs around the village like a moose on three legs.

Her attempts at jump-starting a romantic life for herself are equally as klutzy. ``Can we kiss? Can we court? It's my birthday, I'll pay you for it,'' is her pathetic come-on to a disinterested young missionary (Rhys Miles Thomas) whose handsome, permanent sneer tells us that he'll grow into exactly the kind of jerk her father has become.

But, as many heroines of films like this do, Annie Mary longs for a life on her own terms. We quite rightly fear that she may not possess the wherewithal to get it, but we admire the subversive fervor with which she tries to slip Jack's iron grasp. When a stroke puts her in charge of the relationship for a change, we're thrilled for Annie Mary ... until her goofy acts of assertion, utter incompetence in essential matters and one appalling act of irresponsibility turn the whole village, and possibly even us, against her.

Through it all, the great question looms: Will Annie Mary ever find the guts to again try the one thing she was ever any good at - singing? Without giving away the climax, we'll just say that the answer is provided by the most stirring musical moment put on film in years. It's one that - in its unpretentious but perfectly cinematic orchestration of image, song and earned emotional rightness - does more with the form than all the junk crammed into ``Moulin Rouge.''

A full rarebit, this ``Very Annie Mary.''

VERY ANNIE MARY - Four stars

(Not rated: language, sex)

Starring: Rachel Griffiths, Jonathan Pryce, Joanna Page, Ioan Gruffudd, Matthew Rhys, Ruth Madoc.

Director: Sara Sugarman.

Running time: 1 hr. 45 min.

Playing: Town Center 5, Encino; Fairfax, L.A.; Lido, Newport Beach