THE ARTS/CINEMA	JANUARY 26, 1998 NO. 4
	A Comedy Of Love And Debt By RICHARD SCHICKEL t's a sight to behold and an image to cherish--a little country church, improbably fashioned out of glass and wrought iron, bobbing down an untamed river deep in the 19th century Australian wilderness. How in the world did it and the man delivering it--a nice, pious (if defrocked) clergyman named Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes)--end up in these unlikely precincts? Logically enough, if your definition of the logical encompasses the inherent illogic of human passion. For gangly Oscar, nervous yet nervy in Fiennes' gloriously addled performance, is a gambling man. Gambling is an activity that, as he sees it, permits him leaps and tests of faith, with all his winnings going to churchly charities. He has bet that he can deliver this fragile edifice by a certain date despite the roughness of both the country and the crew that's helping with the tugging and hauling. His wager is with Lucinda Leplastrier (the luminous and spunky Cate Blanchett), also a gambling addict. For her, gambling is a way of asserting herself against gentility and separating herself from some of the money she has inherited but doesn't really want. Equally unlikely for a woman of her time, she is an industrialist. That church is a product of her glass factory, and it is intended as reparation to another clergyman who has been exiled for being seen in her raffish company. O.K., you say, you know where Oscar and Lucinda is heading--toward the kind of happy, reconciling ending that usually crowns romantic period adventures. Don't get too comfortable with that thought. For this story, adapted from Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel by Laura Jones and directed by Gillian Armstrong, is as wayward as its main characters--comic, fierce, digressive. Its business is to turn sure-thing expectations into a game of chance, and provide us with that rarity--a genuinely eccentric yet deeply insinuating film.
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