TV REVIEW : ‘Rainbow’ Yields a Pot of Gold

Treat time. Cable’s Arts & Entertainment network tonight uncorks a novelization of D.H. Lawrence’s “The Rainbow” that greets us like a dreamy ballet, floating weightlessly and melodiously across three successive Saturdays.

These new-to-America episodes from the BBC air at 6 p.m. and repeat at 10 p.m.

Imogen Stubbs is radiant as Ursula Brangwen, an independent flower of a schoolgirl blossoming into womanhood in turn-of-the-century England, determined to escape the future of “housework and hanging about” awaiting her in the rural countryside where her family has lived for three generations.

This adaptation by Anne Devlin centers on Ursula’s coming-of-age story, at once romantic and mysterious. Tormented by visions of her grandfather’s drowning death, Ursula seeks to reconcile her dreams with her roots. She tingles with new feelings and awakened sexuality, seeking a rainbow of new experiences and falling in and out of love--with dashing military officer Anton Skrebensky (Martin Wenner) and older friend Winifred Inger (Kate Buffery).

A small point: Nude scenes involving Ursula and the more experienced Winifred are so exquisitely rendered in the original, uncut BBC production as to appear almost sweetly poetic. A&E; has edited them--for no apparent justifiable reason. This is cable, after all, and what’s more, there is nothing here that is even remotely gratuitous.

Stuart Burge directs sensually and beautifully, almost surrealistically merging scenic verdant riches and industrial grime, and also hope and pessimism as Ursula’s unrewarded search for fulfillment leaves her angry and unhappy as she reaches her 20s. “Is this it?” she asks. “Is this all it is?”

Late in the story comes a striking scene in which Ursula attempts to capture the moon’s reflection in a stream, lifting the water in her cupped hands as if to hold a bit of the moon itself. Of course, it’s illusion. Therein lies a metaphor for her young life, ever seeking but not finding.

Lovely, haunting television.