Wicked Fun

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Bette is the country cousin those aristocratic ninnies the Hulots patronize, exploit and fatally underestimate. They think she's plain (the one aspect of this character that Jessica Lange can't quite convince us of), they know she's repressed, and they seem to feel she's not quite bright. What savage fun it is to see her wreak revenge on this superbly cast chateau of sublimely overconfident fools.

For by the end of this marvelously complex, wickedly comic adaptation of Honore de Balzac's schoolroom classic, she has brought them all to ruin--the philandering father (Hugh Laurie), the spoiled daughter (Kelly MacDonald), the clueless son (Toby Stephens) and, for good measure, a self-absorbed young sculptor (Aden Young) who takes her generosity for granted, not realizing that she loves him. She spares only Elisabeth Shue's actress-courtesan, partly because she too is socially unacceptable, partly because she is so useful as the seductress Bette needs to bring off her schemes.

It's not clear how deeply she has preplanned them and how much they are inspired responses to the shifting circumstances of her shiftless victims. But in a day when intricate plotting has become a lost art, one of Cousin Bette's great pleasures is its capacity to plausibly surprise. It's not its only pleasure. Lange's work is wonderfully controlled, her hidden passions expressed with glancing delicacy. And stage director Des McAnuff, making a smashing film debut, subtly poises the endless, deadly ironies of this tale against the efficiently suggested feverishness of Paris just prior to the revolution of 1848. Rarely has a period film spoken with such energy and immediacy to our impatient modernism.

--By Richard Schickel