The triumph of Mira: a fresh take on a classic play gives a cross-dressing Mira Sorvino her best role since winning an Oscar.

The Triumph of Love * Directed by Clare Peploe * Written by Peploe with Marilyn Goldin and Bernardo Bertolucci, from the play by Marivaux * Starring Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley, Jay Rodan, and Fiona Shaw * Paramount Classics

Viewers familiar with William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night will enjoy the similarities in 18th-century playwright Marivaux's The Triumph of Love, yet another take on hidden identity and the love-hate battle of the sexes. But Marivaux skips the clumsiness associated with one gender pretending to be the other, instead allowing his female-to-male gender bender to exploit her new role with certainty and calculation.

Marivaux's cross-dresser is a princess (played by Mira Sorvino) whose reign is the result of a stolen throne. She plots to restore the rightful prince, the hunky Agis (Jay Rodan), to his royal position beside her. But Agis has been raised in seclusion under the watchful eye of Hermocrates (Ben Kingsley), who has taught him to unequivocally hate the princess, to distrust all females, and to reject love. The princess figures out that to get close to Agis she must appear to him the only way she will be accepted--as a man.

As "Phocion," she can butter up Hermocrates under the pretext of seeking intellectual enlightenment; woo his scientifically minded spinster sister, Leontine (Fiona Shaw), by bathing her in adoring love and attention; and become the friend and playmate Agis has never had. Sorvino, who hasn't seemed to be able to find a decent role to showcase her talents since her Oscar-winning turn in Mighty Aphrodite, has a ball playing around with gender stereotypes as she effortlessly flits between comedy and drama and between her male and female personae. (That the men's styles of the 1700s are as frilly as the women's certainly helps.)

Supporting player Shaw is a continual hoot as an older woman engorged with and empowered by googly-eyed, giddy first love. Director Clare Peploe (Rough Magic) gives the film a nicely faded, sun-drenched look that captures the natural lighting of the era, and she often utilizes props as characters: Agis uses a painted model of the princess for target practice while unwittingly warming to her, and Hermocrates speaks to his statue garden of philosophers as if the real men were there to give him guidance.

Occasionally, peploe pulls us out of the stow by using distracting jump- and rapid-cut editing, and a few times she actually cuts to confusing shots of a modern audience watching the characters as if they're in a play. But these few technical shortcomings don't undermine the wit and gender observations of Marivaux's venerable work.

Marcus also writes for Frontiers.