FAMILY AFFAIRS

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

It was a staple soap-opera plot line of the '70s: a young woman meets a young man to whom she is inexorably drawn, but to her horror she soon discovers that they are brother and sister. That a contemporary drama (one that is unconnected to Aaron Spelling) could fuel itself with such a story line seems absurd. That it would succeed in doing it so artfully is an unanticipated pleasure.

Grand Avenue, premiering on HBO June 30 at 8 p.m. EDT (with later play dates as well), is indeed a rarity. It depicts a family of Native Americans, a culture seldom if ever explored on TV outside Discovery-channel documentaries. Displaced from a reservation to a gang-infested California town, Mollie (Sheila Tousey), the widowed matriarch, tries to quell her rage with drink; but the story ultimately belongs to her eldest daughter Justine (Deeny Dakota), who is battling her own history of despair. The teenager has never known her natural father, but when she finds him, her pain is deepened: he is also the father of the only gentle suitor she has ever had.

The tale, based on a collection of short stories by Greg Sarris, quietly uses the young couple's thwarted desire as a metaphor for the unfulfilled longings of a whole culture. The suffering Justine and her family endure as they try to integrate themselves into American life is unrelenting. And yet the show escapes the polemical feel of works by Leslie Marmon Silko and other chroniclers of Native American life. Haunting and superbly acted, Grand Avenue could give the TV movie a good name.

--By Ginia Bellafante