Cinema: A Little Sex, a Little Death

MISS MARY

1938: Mary Mulligan (Julie Christie), an English governess, comes to Buenos Aires to care for two young girls. Her job is to teach them to be ladies, not women, in a landowner's household where grandmama sorts her old photos into two piles: "alive" and "dead." The family may as well be dead. They disdain their own culture and borrow Britain's; they ignore the dust clouds of rebellion kicked up by Juan Peron's followers. The mood is languorous, but the snake of sensuality curls under the loose garments of the ruling class. When Miss Mary, out of pity and passion, takes the girls' handsome older brother to bed, the family must dismiss her, as Argentina under Peron will soon purge itself of the British influence.

What is Julie Christie doing in this Argentine snooze, when she ought to be igniting bigger, better movies? It is, we guess, an act of both faith and good works for this star with a restless conscience. Some social spirits visit Nicaragua or link hands across America; Christie lends her wattage to a chancy project with a woman director. In the process she gives acting lessons to a diligent but amateur Argentine theatrical troupe. At 45, Christie can appear worn, her face sculpted in suffering, yet on her it looks beautiful. And she is still the consummate actress. In her fastidious steps and erect carriage, in the gentle edge of her schoolmistress voice, she embodies all the poise and repression of the imperial Englishwoman abroad.

Christie's fine shoulders can carry every burden but this picture. Even she is crushed by its lumbering platitudes, its obvious ironies, its pacing mired in quicksand. Maria Luisa Bemberg (who directed a fiery Oscar nominee, the 1984 Camila) never secures her characters in the larger landscape. The Peronistas stay offscreen, darn the luck, while the upper-crusters sit idly by, aspiring to Coward's wit and Chekhov's melancholy. Ennui finally devours them all, long after it has consumed the viewer. By Richard Corliss

THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Everything you have always known about sex but have never heard coming at you from the screen. And perhaps never wanted to either. Such are the ambiguous pleasures of The Decline of the American Empire.

At home, the boys are preparing an elaborate dinner, all the while chopping, mincing and braising the opposite sex as they recount their lubricious adventures. Down at the gym, the girls are working themselves into a lather on the same subject. Writer-Director Denys Arcand has worked out an amusing role reversal to enliven his intensely talkative movie about middle-aged French Canadian academics. And his actors are willing to bare their less than perfect bodies along with their less than perfect souls, thus lending credibility to their reports from the front lines of the war between the sexes.