RUFFLED DUCKLING

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Repression, as everyone knows, makes for bad sex. But it does wonders for romance, obliging the yearning heart to make wondrous imaginative leaps mostly unduplicatable when you're tangled in the reality of rumpled sheets. It follows, therefore, that Ireland in the 1950s, a place where condoms were illegal and priests braying the glories of continence were everywhere, was probably the world capital of romance.

The confusions it could impose on you if you were young, fresh from an upcountry village and suddenly exposed to the subversive stimulations of Trinity College, Dublin, are the subject of the ingratiating, clearheaded, coming-of-age comedy that director Pat O'Connor and writer Andrew Davies have fashioned from Maeve Binchy's novel Circle of Friends. It revolves around three convent-educated girls: Eve (Geraldine O'Rawe), cautiously quirky; Nan (Saffron Burrows), incautiously ambitious, whose effort to seduce her way into the Protestant gentry brings her to near tragedy; and, at the center of the circle, Benny, large, plain, smart and, in Minnie Driver's performance, utterly luminous.

A shopkeeper's daughter, forced by her parents to return home every night lest she be lost to the moral ambiguities of college life, she is lusted after by her father's at first comically creepy, then dangerous clerk (Alan Cumming) and truly loved by, of all people, the cutest, nicest guy on campus (Chris O'Donnell). It shouldn't work, this romance between the ruffled duckling and the swan prince, but it does. Their sweet, determined, gently understated struggle for fulfillment in a superstitiously conservative society makes this densely, deftly packed movie a quiet joy to behold.