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The ambitious Beckett on Film Project [Canada/Ireland] is off to a woeful start with its opening bill. The 13-minute “Not I” (which seems to last more than half an hour) stars the usually splendid Julianne Moore, directed by her gifted “End of the Affair” helmer, Neil Jordan. (The film’s limited visual vocabulary consists of shifting from one side of Moore’s mouth to another.) The close-up of a woman’s teeth and lips, called for by Beckett (which has to be represented, on stage, by an enlarged, painted mouth) should be a natural for film. Ms. Moore’s pink-lipsticked mouth and perfect teeth would seem ideal for the promotion for any toothpaste or lip rouge, were this mouth-fixated movie only a commercial. But Moore has been relentlessly directed by Jordan to go at a pace which destroys all the sense and nuance of Beckett’s rich, sad, and elegantly written narrative.

I hoped that John Hurt would recreate his acclaimed stage performance in “Krapp’s Last Tape.” But in Atom Egoyan’s austere and reverential film (shot in only three days), Hurt contributes only his smoke-burnished voice, his facial seams, greying hair and a severe taciturnity. The nasty if cunning critic, John Simon, asked Egoyan at the Festival press conference why his “Krapp” was less poignant and funny than the previous twelve or so he had seen in the theater. The humorless but haughty Egoyan gave as good as he got. He said that neither polarity of laughter or tears was his intent as “Krapp” (which he knew far better than Simon) was about “fortitude.”

Having directed two of Beckett’s full-length plays, I regret to inform Mr. Egoyan, that the key to success with his works is knowing just where the tears and laughter lie — especially with an author who sees life’s deepest sorrows as hilarities.

In a play like “Krapp,” where the protagonist keeps devouring bananas and takes a vaudevillian skid on one of their skins, the text is chock full of gags, if the obsessive taper is allowed maximum eccentricity. In the theater, I am told, Hurt was both hilarious and deeply moving. (The bags under Hurt’s eyes are now so big they could store miniature bananas.)

Michael Colgan, the director of Dublin’s Gate Theater, and his partner, Alan Moloney, have staged and toured all of Beckett’s plays, but there seems little budget or license for even the big named directors in the Film Project to do their most distinctive work.

“Krapp’s Last Tape” cries out for some sort of fuzzy or mistaken flashbacks, but the producers’ directive to Egoyan was not to “cut to the punt” [the scene of Krapp’s abortive lovemaking].

Nonetheless, much as I dread the all-Irish “Waiting For Godot,” I do look forward to seeing David Mamet direct Harold Pinter in the forthcoming film of Beckett’s late, miniature “Catastrophe” Pinter and Mamet are, after all, Beckett’s most notable playwriting disciples, and the play’s eight-minute length may provide a beneficial restriction.

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I resisted the stately, opening half hour of Terence Davies’ adaptation of Edith Wharton’s great novel, “The House of Mirth” [UK/USA-Sony Pictures Classics] for quite a while; just as I have been turned off, previously, by Davies’ critically lauded but densely poetic pictures.

In “Mirth,” though its women are dressed to resemble the lush turn-of-the-century portraits of John Singer Sargent, this low-budgeted film lacks the display of the seductive comforts of the Super Rich depicted in the previous adaptation of a great Wharton novel, Scorsese’s “The Age of Innocence.” Interestingly, both of Wharton’s best novels are about abortive love affairs crushed by New York’s high societal moral code and, in both, a superb woman is destroyed for violating its mores by her independent actions. Lily Bart, the social martyr of “House of Mirth,” is a role that would have been perfect for the young Meryl Streep or Vanessa Redgrave. I found Gillian (“X Files”) Anderson too robust, too sexually forward, and not truly aristocratic. But Lily’s downfall ultimately overwhelmed me, just as adversity overcame the heroine. (Lily’s fatality makes her either the most tragic figure in American literature or the equal of Dreiser’s pathetic Sister Carrie.)

Davies’s film is, like several of his early works, kept deliberately dark as though no light could penetrate its curtained, sitting rooms. The project is a giant labor-of-love for writer-drector Davies who tried to interest a producer for 13 years, while he perfected his script. A couple of cast members make the text seem stilted and their period clothes uncomfortable so that it seems the picture couldn’t possibly work until it devastates, as Scorsese’s more beautifully shot and acted “Age of Innocence” did not.

Besides Anderson’s forcefulness, only Anthony LaPaglia, as a rich, ever-rejected, Jewish suitor of Lily’s, and Laura Linney as Lily’s cunning traducer are first rate. Dan Ackroyd is occasionally maladroit as a married banker in lust with Lily and Eleanor Bron trots out another of her haugthy battleaxes. Eric Stoltz as Lawrence Selden, Lily’s secret admirer, has red hair which complements Anderson’s and he would be Lily’s heart’s desire if not for his church mouse income as a lawyer. It may be the gay director Davies’s perverse reading that Selden is an unacknowledged gay man as demonstrated by Stolz’s epicene sibilance which disqualifies him as Anderson’s mate regardless of their shared penury. Even a cattleprod would likely not have roused Stoltz from his effeminate passivity.

At his press conference, Terence Davies demonstrated that he is one of the campiest (“. . .if I was wearing a dress, as I frequently do, while answering the phone . . .,”) and most erudite figures in cinema. He directed his American cast with snatches of apt poetry, while, at the conference, he quoted obscure T.S. Eliot verse and discussed the profundity of Mahler’s evolving Mozart’s merely ornamental trills. (The seraphic trio from Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutte” figures as significantly in “The House of Mirth” as it did in Schlesinger’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday.”)

My gratitude to Sony Classics Pictures for picking up “The House of Mirth,” which will now be shown in theaters in its proper widescreen ratio, rather than the scanned print to be shown on Showtime and Granada TV, the film’s producers. My gratitude to the Film Festival, whose imprimatur has garnered distributors for many of its entries which previously lacked them.

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“The Circle” [Iran/Italy – Winstar Cinema] had the force of a Feminist thunderbolt when it was shown the morning after the critics’ screening of “The House of Mirth.”

“The Circle” states its theme at the start. A grandmother goes to a maternity ward to ascertain the gender of her grandchild. Informed, by a nurse, that it’s a girl, granny storms out, prophesying a divorce between the baby’s parents and their in-laws.

Women are without status in the fundamentalist prison state which is Iran. Only the young and pretty can momentarily arouse the interest of the culture’s domineering males. And once they have been had, they are as disposable as pocket tissue.

Following the granny’s exit, the film appears to focus on a couple of young women uniformly dressed in the bleak, gray, smock-like coats which obliterate the female figure as their black scarves conceal their faces. These women are trying to escape rearrest and to board a bus without having proper ID or a protective male escort.

When they spy a reproduction of Van Gogh’s green cypresses (a contrast to the brown dust bowl in which they live), they long to escape to a “paradise” of such greenery.

To our surprise, the film is as circular as its title. Just when we get caught up with these young women or others, the film moves on to involve us in yet another woman’s desperate plight. The most pathetic is the single mother who is obliged to leave her adored, two-year-old daughter on the street, in the hope she will receive regular meals and shelter as an adoptee. Although most of these women have escaped from prison, they have only found their way to certain recapture in the total police state which is present-day Iran.

Everyone, regardless of gender, is dying for a smoke. Cigarettes are the only escape for the desperate and despairing inmates of the detention state. You might conclude, with the filmmaker, that the nation is on its last gasp. This is a surprising work coming from Jafar Panahi, the maker of the delightful “The White Balloon” of 1995. This gifted director is no longer following little girls into a benign jungle of cities. Now he films them as the desperate creatures that they have become with age.

The picture is so skillfully shot and acted by a mixed cast of amateurs and professionals, that only the director could point out which actresses were which to the Festival’s assembled journalists.

It is fortunate that “The Circle” won top prize at this year’s Venice Film Festival; otherwise this denunciatory work might have been banned and the gifted Panahi barred from filmmaking in his native land.

This was precisely the fate of Bahman Farmanara, the writer-director of the Festival’s “Smell of Camphor, Fragrance of Jasmine,” [Iran – New Yorker Films] an autobiographical, black comedy about a once-successful director forbidden, for 24 years, from making another film in Iran, along with most of his former co-workers. The delectable “Smell of Camphor” represents Farmanara’s return to filmmaking in Iran after a quarter century’s disbarment and exile.

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A 13-minute short, “Anino” [Phillippines], shown with “The Circle,” has a facile, O.Henry twist to the end of its tale of a poor, nearly-outmoded photographer of church wedding couples being bested by a street urchin. I find the short both pleasurable and worthy of its award as the best short in Cannes. It was also superior to any of the other shorts screened at the New York Film Festival.

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A special retrospective at the Festival was the screening of race pictures pioneer, Oscar Michaux’s “Body and Soul,” a 1925 silent film notable, chiefly, for the film debut of the 26-year-old Paul Robeson in a starring, dual role.

Robeson plays Isaiah, a vicious, hard-drinking con man who poses as a pious preacher, as well as his virtuous twin brother, a kindly inventor. They both love the fetching daughter of a religious, big-bosomed Mama. Mama keeps her life-sustaining stash of cash hidden in the family bible, which she devoutly trusts more than a safety deposit box. You may be sure that Isaiah raids, but never reads her big bible.

This dreadful picture was shown in a fine, nearly complete print from the collection of the George Eastman House in Rochester. Its crudity was amplifed by continuous darkie dialogue used throughout the intertitles, like that old minstrel standby, “gwine” for “going to.”

The real attraction of the Festival’s presentation, beyond sight of the handsome, young Robeson, was the remarkable, original jazz score composed by Wycliffe Gordon, the trombonist of Wynton Marsalis’ terrific Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra.

Gordon’s score has pastiche elements, such as refrains from “Sidewalks of New York” and “Red River Valley,’ not to mention a final quote from Johnny Green’s song, “Body and Soul.” The Jazz Orchestra makes a joyous noise on a New Orleans-jazz flavored “Dry Bones” and when they perform concerted thigh slaps to create a sound like tap dancing, it is a new percussive thrill. In short, the score is vastly superior to the contemptible antiquity it accompanied.

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“In the Mood for Love” [Hong Kong – USA Films) is a new, melancholy film by the stylish Wong Kar-wai, that poet of darkness who gave us such hectic nighttime extravaganzas as “Fallen Angels” (1995) and “Happy Together” (1997). The film is about an apparently unconsummated romance between an attractive, mid-30s couple whose spouses are cheating on them — presumably, with each other.

Suspiciously, Mrs. Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung), the inamorata of her next-door neighbor, Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) is always in fancy, form-fitting outfits late at night. “No one dresses like that for the noodle shop,” one neighbor comments, although late night noodles or a late film are the white lies used by the glorious Cheung on her “see-no-evil” swain.

As Madame Zhen’s assignations occur off-screen, I don’t know what’s really up, except that Cheung and Leung never quite manage to hold hands. Leung aches for her the rest of his life, and, at film’s end, he wanders disconsolately through the ruins of Angkor Wat lamenting his lost love. Two aspects of this film are extraordinary. The color pallet of the picture is unique (“aquarium-green and gold-vermillion,” according to the spot-on program-note appellation) And a marvelously lush, string score which alternates with Nat King Cole ballads such as “Green Eyes,” in Spanish, along with “Quesa, Quesa, Quesa.” This is a required CD for ardent bedmates. The entire brew is intoxicating.

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