Love and Death on Long Island

By RICHARD CORLISS

We think ourselves ladies and gentlemen of taste, connoisseurs of finer books and deeper thoughts. Then we see some ravishing creature on the street or the screen, and we are starstruck kids, our brains shut off, hearts turned to mush.

Giles De'Ath (John Hurt), a reclusive English novelist, has had so little contact with the late 20th century that he can't tell a microwave from a VCR. One day, by mistake, he watches a trashy teenpic called Hotpants College 2 and finds, he thinks, a reason for loving. In an actor named Ronnie Bostock (Jason Priestley), Giles sees all the beauty of the ages in one glorious package. The donnish writer buys fan mags, rents B-minus films, immerses himself in the detritus of Bostockiana. To your eyes Ronnie might seem a bland dreamboat, but that is part of the fun in this delicious comedy. And part of the truth: for it is a mark of obsession that it fixes its gaze on an object whose appeal is inexplicable.

Director Richard Kwietniowski, adapting Gilbert Adair's novel, uses Priestley's fretful blankness to handsome comic effect. But Hurt is the big news here. Dignified and dithery, he makes Giles one of the most charming predators in ages. Like Von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, like Lolita's Humbert Humbert, he is a man of culture finding beauty in youth, in coarseness--in "all that I myself have never been." To Giles, ecstasy comes in small packages. For viewers, this film is one of them.

--R.C.