FILM : A Subtle, Intelligent ‘Thelma & Louise’

“Entre Nous,” Diane Kurys’ 1983 film about the love between two French women during the 1950s, inspires all sorts of praise. It’s an intelligent and affecting portrait of female bonding during an era wrapped in convention.

But it also provokes a huge criticism. In this, her third film (she hit the track running with the autobiographical “Peppermint Soda” in 1977 and “Cocktail Molotov” in 1980), Kurys can’t resist using men as incriminatingly drawn contrasts to her more sympathetic and complex female heroines, Lena (Isabelle Huppert) and Madeleine (Miou Miou).

Their husbands, Michel (Guy Marchand) and Costa (Jean-Pierre Bacri), may not be saddled with the kind of grotesque stereotyping reserved for most of the rednecks in a movie such as “Thelma & Louise,” but Kurys does stack the deck in rendering them culpable but hardly capable.

It’s surprising, especially when considering how sensitively she describes Lena and Madeleine and their developing relationship in “Entre Nous,” which screens at UC Irvine on Friday night. Well, this is meant to be a woman’s film first and foremost--a distaff buddy-buddy exploration with psychological and erotic undertones--and Michel and Costa must serve primarily as backdrops for their wives’ reflection and revolution.

Despite this weakness in characterization, the film is eloquent with many of the issues that were bludgeoned into our heads in the crudely galvanizing “Thelma & Louise.” It touches delicately on the near-spiritual bonding that can occur between women, the frustration they face with men who don’t understand their emotional values, the anger over having to conform and the importance of sexuality on the female psyche.

The movie begins in the Pyrenees in 1942, when Lena, a Belgian Jew, reluctantly marries Michel, a French Legionnaire, to avoid being sent to a concentration camp. These stark, desperate moments are intercut by more sublime scenes of Madeleine’s courtship to a young art student, the love of her life who is killed off before we have much an idea about him.

Years later, after Madeleine has married Costa, a dim failure of an actor and a petty businessman, and Lena has settled into boring domesticity with the apish Michel, the two women meet at an elementary school pageant. It’s love at first sight, and the story proceeds as something of a feminist allegory, linking us to both (especially Lena) as they grow through each other’s inspiration and devotion.

While Kurys is never less than rejoicing about Lena and Madeleine’s liberation--once they’ve met, the film takes on a lyrical look; both actresses are shot flatteringly, with cinematographer Bernard Lutic’s camera lingering on their great looks and elegant individualism--she makes sure it comes with a price.

To cultivate their understanding of one another and themselves, they ignore their children and deceive their husbands. The marriages are doomed, and both Lena and Madeleine have an air of selfishness hanging over their intimacy.

“Entre Nous,” in the end, becomes a story of women living with women and throwing aside convention to do so. The steps in the process may be radical, and at times cruel, but Kurys apparently feels that anything goes when dashing toward self-discovery.

What: Diane Kurys’ “Entre Nous.”

When: Friday, Oct. 11, at 7 and 9 p.m.

Where: UC Irvine’s Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to Jamboree Road and head south. Go east on Campus Drive to Bridge Road. Take Bridge Road into the campus.

Wherewithal: $2 to $4.

Where to Call: (714) 856-6379.