MOVIE REVIEW : WEAVER SHOWS HER BEST STUFF IN ‘HALF MOON’

Little advance fuss has been made about “Half Moon Street,” American director Bob Swaim’s first film since his hard-edged French policier “La Balance.” With Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine, it is provocative, possibly enraging, and marvelously well photographed and acted.

The film (at the Metro Theater and Cineplex, Beverly Center) resists easy pigeonholing, a fact that can drive studios wild--it disappeared mysteriously from its programmed slot as a gala at the recent Toronto film festival. “Half Moon Street” is a character study, romance and contemporary political thriller, with faintly satiric underpinnings.

At its heart it has the damnedest, most accomplished, most infuriating, most intriguing heroine the screen has accommodated since Bette Davis in her prime. And even Davis didn’t entertain gentlemen callers topless on her exercise bike.

No, that would be Sigourney Weaver’s Lenore Slaughter, a jock, a brain, a multilingual Ph.D., and as we first meet her, a decidedly penniless American in London. Recently divorced, on a fellowship at a research institute with strong ties to the Arab world, she has great social/political entree but barely enough shillings for the gas meter.

A dinner party sets her sparring with a smug, watchful international banker, Hugo Van Arkady (Keith Buckley), and the next day a videotape is delivered to her: television coverage of the life of an “escort girl” for London’s posh, infamous Jasmine Agency. It’s an idea whose time has come with the rent bill.

After coolly interviewing the Jasmine management, she signs up to become, presumably, their first renta-Mensa. Certainly she’s the only one of their “girls” to scrub off her makeup, turn up for dates wearing basic Villager and flats, and discuss her recent paper on “The Future of OPEC.”

Since she is short-tempered, opinionated and barely accommodating, you wonder if her appeal might not lie with faintly self-reviling clients.

The appeal of this work is that she stays in control, chooses whom she lingers with and whom she turns down. Then, she meets as a client Sam Bulbeck (Michael Caine), a self-made member of the House of Lords and behind-the-scenes statesman in a top-secret scheme to secure peace in the Middle East. And he is a fairly recent widower.

Suddenly, as the two circle and feint, attract and deflect, the story is off and percolating, with a plethora of remarkable subsidiary characters and a tightening sense of danger. Caine’s mustachioed Bulbeck, contentedly whipping up eggs for both of them, post-lovemaking, is a surprisingly moving, magnetic man, exuding comfort and power--the one fish who may be a little outside her lure.

Never abandoning her various clients nor giving up her academic daytime life, Slaughter moves up to a luxury flat on Half Moon Street, the gift of a Lebanese friend (Nadim Sawalha). At times the camera silently sweeps the empty apartment like a metal detector; we are never unaware that Slaughter and Bulbeck are under constant surveillance, but from whom and why is part of the tension.

But Slaughter’s moonlighting sexual activities have almost no emotional residue. “Belle de Jour,” “Mona Lisa” or even “Tightrope” suggested the powerful effects of a schizophrenic sexual identity. “Half Moon Street” suggests that it can leave one utterly unscarred, and, whether Slaughter is a master of control or not, it doesn’t ring true.

Somehow, Lauren Slaughter’s perfection (“She speaks Chinese like one of us,” the Chinese ambassador to London murmurs), combined with her outspoken smugness, never quite becomes insufferable, although it hovers right at the brink. (“Look at the garbage these people eat,” she says reprovingly, raiding her aristocratic English hostess’ refrigerator at midnight. “Their colons must be a mess.”) We’re held by our fascination with Weaver--her insanely American physicality, her chutzpah, her ease with her own body and her wild combination of intelligence and naivete.

There are times, however, when you wish that Swaim and co-screenwriter Edward Behr, a cultural editor at Newsweek in Paris, who adapted Paul Theroux’s novel “Doctor Slaughter,” thought a sense of humor was as vital to a contemporary woman as the ability to lecture on petro-dollars.

But even with these and other possible quibbles “Half Moon Street” is in no way a dismissable film. And it would seem to be absolutely mandatory for Weaver fans eager to see her range, beyond the weapons and gadgets of “Aliens.”

‘HALF MOON STREET’ A 20th Century Fox Film Corp. release of an RKO Pictures and Edward R. Pressman Film Corp. in association with Showtime/The Movie Channel Inc. presentation of a Geoff Reeve Production and a Bob Swaim Film. Executive producers, Pressman, David Korda. Producer Reeve. Director Swaim. Associate producer John Davis. Music Richard Harvey. Editor Richard Marden. Costumes Louise Frogley. Production designer Anthony Curtis. Camera Peter Hannan. Screenplay Swaim, Edward Behr, based on the novel “Doctor Slaughter” by Paul Theroux. Art director Peter Williams, Set decorator Peter Young. Sound Robin Gregory. With Sigourney Weaver, Michael Caine, Patrick Kavanagh, Faith Kent, Ram John Holder, Keith Buckley, Patrick Newman, Niall O’Brien, Nadim Sawalha.

MPAA-rated: R (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult guardian)

Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.