Trainspotting.

SENTIMENTALITY and melodrama are frequent partners in crime. The sentimental comedy or drama (depending on the ending) jerks tears; melodrama, always ending happily, thrives on chills and suspense. How does one marry the two? By taking, say, a poor but honest orphan girl, and exposing her to the machinations of a villain or villains: will she succumb or escape, yield or be rescued? This was the stuff of D. W. Griffith and his many legatees.

Nowadays, though melodrama continues to thrive, sentimentality is no longer a staple. Done in partly by greater sexual freedom, partly by pop psychology -- the two combining to make virtue and vice less clear-cut matters -- sentimentality has been replaced by spurious sophistication. What makes The Spitfire Grill noteworthy is its attempt to turn back the clock. It is surely no accident that its writer-director, Lee David Zlotoff, comes from television, that newish medium where ancient forms survive best. Nonstop mass entertainment postulates plunder of the past.

In Zlotoff's feature-film debut, pretty Percy Talbot (or Talbott, depending on whether you go by the press kit or the screen credits), arrives in the small, soporific, and symbolically named Gilead, Maine, which this Ohioan has picked for her home after having completed a five-year prison term for manslaughter. She learned about the place while working as a telephonic tourist-bureau clerk in prison, where this woodsy, hilly, and waterfally locale struck her as the perfect locus for regeneration. She becomes a waitress and cook at the Spitfire Grill, the town's only eatery, owned by the crusty, elderly Hannah Ferguson, who has been trying to sell it for years -- ever since her son Eli, the town's spiritual sparkplug, failed to return from Vietnam.

Percy is viewed with suspicion by many, and outright hostility by two. One of these is the town's postmistress and chief busybody; the other is the realtor Nahum Goddard, Hannah's nephew, who always lived in Eli's shadow. He bullies his repressed wife, Shelby; tries unsuccessfully to dominate Hannah; and nurtures fantasies about the town's abandoned granite quarry, as well as other designs with which Percy could interfere. He becomes her relentless persecutor.

On plucky Percy's side, however, are Shelby, the bullied wife and mother, who eagerly helps the girl with her restaurant chores; Sheriff Walsh, impressed by all the Gilead lore Percy has acquired in jail; Joe Sperling, an inarticulate young mechanic who falls in love with her; and finally even Hannah, who, bedridden from a fall, finds Percy an able helper. What with the blossoming friendship between Percy and Shelby, and the town's gradual acceptance of the newcomer, things might have progressed serenely. But given a mysterious recluse in the nearby woods, an essay contest for ownership of the Spitfire that brings in a goodly sum for Hannah, and Nahum's underhanded maneuvering, the outcome is, at best, bittersweet.

Some things here are hard to believe. Why does that supposedly rich quarry remain unexploited? Why would the rest of the country know about the essay contest so much earlier than Gilead? How can a whole town participate in adjudicating it? Why would the hermit in the forest remain unknown to all but Hannah and Percy? But never mind: the movie is like a stray, eager-to-please puppy that has wandered into your yard -- virtually impossible to kick out.

Much of this hinges on the likable performances, especially from what in rural Maine may still be called the distaff side. Alison Elliott as Percy, Ellen Burstyn as Hannah, and Marcia Gay Harden as Shelby are a good acting company, and good company for the audience. If you keep your expectations modest, you will find the fare at The Spitfire Grill to your liking. Especially as the Maine landscapes are elatingly evoked by Roger Draper's Wyethian camera.

A similarly unassuming film that nevertheless yields distinct pleasures is Manny & Lo, a title in which the now ubiquitous ampersand makes yet another unsolicited appearance. We have here the adventures of two sisters from different foster homes: Manny, 11, and Lo, 16, who drive around in a station wagon, live by minimal shoplifting, and sleep in model homes scattered throughout pastoral America.

Unlikely, you say, and I agree; but that is how premises often are, not least in such a masterpiece as King Lear. Lo finds her accumulating baby fat to be advanced pregnancy, and wants to have, though not keep, her baby. So the girls abduct a woman in her forties, Elaine, who works in a maternity store, and whom they mistake for a trained nurse. For childbirth, they hole up in a vacant summer home off the beaten path. Elaine is held prisoner by means of a chain on her feet with a combination lock. In the daytime, she hops about; at night, she struggles to crack the combination. But Manny, a brainy kid, has found the paper scroll on which Elaine records the combinations she has tried, and can estimate how long it will take the woman to free herself.

Despite everything, a sort of family feeling springs up between captors and captive, and there are a few amusing incidents involving others as well. Still, as so often with low-budget movies, there is a feeling of a near-uninhabited world, with the characters adrift in a vacuum. But the two characterful girls and the lonely woman coming to enjoy even such parlous company make for an unusual enough threesome. And baby makes four, wherewith things debouch on a well-earned, smiling conclusion.

Mary Kay Place gives a succulently querulous performance as Elaine, and Scarlett Johansson (Manny) and Aleksa Palladino (Lo) are burstingly natural and believable. This first feature by the writer-director Lisa Krueger was shot by her brother, Tom, to complete the brimming familial beatitude.

It may be that if you speak Scots, do not care about narrative logic, relish scatology, and enjoy watching young heroin addicts go about their business (which includes crimes in obtaining the drugs), you will find Trainspotting a triumph. If not, you may wonder what's going on half the time, and why you should care the rest. The dialogue, which is occasionally quite funny, is only intermittently decipherable, although the soundtrack has been re-edited for ears not trained in spotting dialect-shrouded meanings.

The film sometimes turns surreal, as when a youth excretes his druggy suppositories into what styles itself "the worst toilet in Scotland," then crawls head-first into it and swims through, er, muddy waters to retrieve them. (You may be relieved to learn that in Irvine Wells's novel, this episode, like so much else, is even less savory.) At other times, the stuff, even without hitting the fan, flies through the air. Some of this is Rabelaisianly uproarious: most of it merely gross.

The film's continuity is deliberately discontinuous, but that is in keeping with nerves as raw as frayed jeans. Good acting all around, with the psychotic Begbie of Robert Carlyle most virtuosic, and Ewan McGregor's Renton, the protagonist, very nearly appealing. Danny Boyle has directed with condign jaggedness, and Brian Tufano's cinematography executes poster-art effects rivetingly. Trainspotting may well offer catchy fine points on second viewing, if only one could get over the first.