Wilde.

There have been two previous films about Oscar Wilde. In the 1959 Oscar Wilde, Robert Morley re-created a stage performance, amusingly but without much charisma. In the 1960 The Trials of Oscar Wilde, Peter Finch was a superb Wilde and John Frazer a very fine Alfred Douglas. Neither film covered sufficient ground. Wilde, written by the gifted Julian Mitchell and directed by Brian Gilbert, whose Tom and Viv (about T. S. Eliot) was less than compelling, tries to go farther and deeper, but doesn't quite come off, either.

There is an unfortunate Masterpiece Theatre aura about Wilde, which, it must be conceded, would have been hard to avoid. Put some fine English actors into lavish costumes and opulent settings, photograph them resplendently, and what else will you get? Of course, this story is more somber and seedy, but it is also illumined by Wilde's charm and wit, and so that more or less balances out. The film shows some of Wilde's sordid relations with servants and stable boys, and does not shy away from all male sex scenes. Yet it tends to sentimentalize, not least by Stephen Fry's rather too sweet and concerned Oscar, and it does not go into those wretched post-prison years of exile, poverty, drink, and degradation, leading to a pauper's death at 46. All that is laconically summed up in a title card.

Fry is an interesting actor (and a good writer as well), who does manage to look rather like Wilde. But whereas Oscar was not exactly good-looking (Peter Finch, still my favorite Wilde, was perhaps too handsome), neither was he as funny-faced as Fry is. His somewhat beady and close-set eyes, crooked nose going off to the left, and mouth tending to curl to the right create a comic look that works for some scenes but undercuts others. Still, he is of the right large size, moves well, and delivers his lines stylishly. However, helped by the script (based on Richard Ellmann's biography), he does make Wilde into a rather more tender-hearted, even conscientious, figure than he must have been. Especially his relations with Constance, the wife he mistreated, and the two sons he neglected are artfully glossed over.

Mitchell's screenplay uses Wilde's story "The Selfish Giant" as a sort of refrain or incremental repetition. We see Wilde reading installments of the story (Constance, too, gets some) to the boys; later, we hear him read passages in voice-over whenever the movie returns to the kids. But as the story records the giant's coming to love the children he at first hated, these prose-poetic passages put a sentimental sheen on Wilde's treatment of Cyril and Vyvyan. Oscar, other than superficially, remained a selfish giant.

Inexplicably, the film shortchanges the three trials that are at the core of Wilde's downfall--tragic when you consider how many others, not a few of noble birth and high rank, indulged in the same practices with impunity. We are not even given the key moment in court when Edward Carson, cross-examining Wilde, asked whether he had ever kissed the 16-year-old Walter Grainger. "Oh, dear, no," was the reply. "He was, unfortunately, extremely ugly." The jury was shocked, and this proved the turning point in the case. But what also heavily contributed to Wilde's undoing was the wit he exhibited on the witness stand. Though it elicited much laughter, it also stirred up the resentment of the humorless; wit as much as homosexuality condemned Oscar Wilde. But the movie does not convey this.

The supporting roles are well taken. The handsome Jude Law is a tempestuous, recklessly amoral, fickle yet demanding Lord Alfred; Jennifer Ehle is a touching yet unsappy Constance; Vanessa Redgrave does nicely by Oscar's mother (though the part, like some others, does not allow for detailed characterization); Tom Wilkinson manages to make the beastly Marquess of Queensberry just a bit ludicrously human as well; Zoe Wanamaker is a quietly sympathetic Ada Leverson. Although good otherwise, Michael Sheen is a somewhat batrachian Robert Ross, and one doubts whether Oscar would have wanted to kiss him.

The prison sequences, though brief, make their powerful point. I had no idea, for instance, that inmates exercising in the prison yard had to wear hideous masks, and the treadmill scenes are good and scary. Martin Fuhrer, new to me, delivers sensitive cinematography, and Debbie Wiseman's music makes its effects economically. The final title card quotes the famous epigram from Lady Windermere's Fan: "There are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." Wilde, poor fellow, had his share of both. Even so, a film detailing his pathetic decline has yet to be made. Or would that be too shattering to bear?

* That splendid Italian director Francesco Rosi has not had a film here for some time. Now we get his 1996 The Truce, based on Primo Levi's 1963 memoir, The Reawakening. It tells what happened to Levi between the Russians' liberation of the sick and crippled at Auschwitz (the healthy had been marched off to their deaths by the Nazis) in January 1945, and his arrival home in Turin nine months later. The young Jewish chemist and anti-Fascist activist had been captured by the Germans and sent to Auschwitz, which he had the luck to survive. There followed a tragicomic odyssey.

Levi's experiences have their share of horror, but are mostly grotesque. There are the three months in Katowice where Levi works for the Russians as a hospital orderly. Then it is staggering marches and crazy detours by whatever trains were available up and down Russia, Byelorus, and Ukraine. Levi, who was to become a famous writer and successful businessman, never recovered from his past. In 1987, soon after hearing that The Truce was beginning to shoot, he committed suicide.

Perhaps the most colorful character Primo meets is a Greek, a cynical, sardonic opportunist who makes him carry his heavy bag, but also imparts lessons in survival. As they separate, the Greek gives Primo a pair of sturdy shoes, without which one cannot even forage for food. When they meet up again, the Greek is blithely running an itinerant brothel and offers Primo a girl at a much-reduced rate.

A Russian victory celebration is transformed by a recording of "Cheek to Cheek," to which a uniformed soldier does a clumsy Astaire imitation as a crowd of miserable deportees watches transfigured, their sexual longings reawakened. Another time, Primo and a starving band of his fellow Italians come across a farmer who is ready to shoot them. But when Primo does a comic impersonation of a chicken, he gets the amused farmer to give one to the gang. Still later, Primo comes across a young woman he saw the Nazis abuse at Auschwitz, and tentative, groping, bittersweet lovemaking ensues.

The film, written chiefly by Rosi and that old hand Tonino Guerra, is episodic and shapeless, but how else to convey desperate errings by foot and rail through a topsy-turvy Eastern Europe? John Turturro, who usually plays weirdos and maniacs, portrays Levi as introverted, bespectacled, soft-spoken, and shy. It is a good performance, though not quite a great one, somewhat overshadowed by that of the Serbian actor Rade Serbedzia as the Greek.

The location photography, mostly in Ukraine, and mostly by another fine old Italian hand, Pasqualino De Santis, is both vivid and stark: the present in color, the death-camp memories in black-and-white. There are sentimental moments, but they are relatively few. And there are two tremendous lines. One is Primo's answer when told the war is over: "War is always." The other is Primo's observation, "God cannot exist if Auschwitz exists." Worth pondering, that.