Screen Tests

fanfair

A Handful of Dust" feels longer than it is, not because it's dull but because it keeps expanding. You may think at first that it's just the sort of hypercivilized bagatelle that keeps Anglophiles glued to PBS (like Brideshead Revisited, it's a Charles Sturridge version of an Evelyn Waugh novel). But Dust is about people slowly ruining their lives out of carelessness and whimsy, and the net effect is at once titillating and bewilderingly sad. Sturridge never gets beyond television technique, yet he handles his actors like a

master, especially Kristin Scott Thomas (above), who is everything one wants in a Waugh heroine: knowing but not worldly, witty but not brittle, and lubricious without losing her air of being the most expensive of glittering prizes. • Eric Rohmer's "Boyfriends and Girlfriends" is a predictable, lighter-than-air fable about boyfriend switching, but it works anyway. At his best, Rohmer can make banality communicate something much headier, and watching this movie, you can feel it happen. The setting, an otherworldly suburban development, comes to seem a theatrical test tube in which various moral chemistries take place, and the performers, all boring novices when we meet them, become strangely beautiful as they react with one another. Boyfriends surprises you—it gives off an unexpected fizz.

STEPHEN SCHIFF