By Richard Corliss, Richard Schickel

MISS MARY

1938: Mary Mulligan (Julie Christie), an English governess, comes to Buenos Aires to care for two young girls. Her job is to teach them to be ladies, not women, in a landowner's household where grandmama sorts her old photos into two piles: "alive" and "dead." The family may as well be dead. They disdain their own culture and borrow Britain's; they ignore the dust clouds of rebellion kicked up by Juan Peron's followers. The mood is languorous, but the snake of sensuality curls under the loose garments of the ruling class. When Miss Mary, out of pity and passion, takes the girls' handsome older brother to bed, the family must dismiss her, as Argentina under Peron will soon purge itself of the British influence.

What is Julie Christie doing in this Argentine snooze, when she ought to be igniting bigger, better movies? It is, we guess, an act of both faith and good works for this star with a restless conscience. Some social spirits visit Nicaragua or link hands across America; Christie lends her wattage to a chancy project with a woman director. In the process she gives acting lessons to a diligent but amateur Argentine theatrical troupe. At 45, Christie can appear worn, her face sculpted in suffering, yet on her it looks beautiful. And she is still the consummate actress. In her fastidious steps and erect carriage, in the gentle edge of her schoolmistress voice, she embodies all the poise and repression of the imperial Englishwoman abroad.

Christie's fine shoulders can carry every burden but this picture. Even she is crushed by its lumbering platitudes, its obvious ironies, its pacing mired in quicksand. Maria Luisa Bemberg (who directed a fiery Oscar nominee, the 1984 Camila) never secures her characters in the larger landscape. The Peronistas stay offscreen, darn the luck, while the upper-crusters sit idly by, aspiring to Coward's wit and Chekhov's melancholy. Ennui finally devours them all, long after it has consumed the viewer. By Richard Corliss

THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Everything you have always known about sex but have never heard coming at you from the screen. And perhaps never wanted to either. Such are the ambiguous pleasures of The Decline of the American Empire.

At home, the boys are preparing an elaborate dinner, all the while chopping, mincing and braising the opposite sex as they recount their lubricious adventures. Down at the gym, the girls are working themselves into a lather on the same subject. Writer-Director Denys Arcand has worked out an amusing role reversal to enliven his intensely talkative movie about middle-aged French Canadian academics. And his actors are willing to bare their less than perfect bodies along with their less than perfect souls, thus lending credibility to their reports from the front lines of the war between the sexes.

Age has lent a certain desperation to their skirmishes. Diane (Louise Portal) has lately discovered the dubious pleasures of masochism. Louise (Dorothee Berryman) is devastated to discover that her husband has been to bed with one of the three other women who eventually gather for dinner. Dominique (Dominique Michel) is a theorist who has recently published a book that correlates the rise of sexual activity and of feminism with the decline of a society's imperial pretensions. Proving her point, she ends up taking the party's youngest, wimpiest male to bed. The older men's confusions are less sharply defined and less easily resolved. Two of them even confess a certain envy for the good looks and free-cruising life of the group's token homosexual.

But this is a movie in which words -- here cascades of French -- speak louder than actions, and the question is whether this relentlessly articulate crowd of theorizers is worth listening to. The answer, alas, is both yes and no. Indeed, there is bitter, humorous truth in many of the anecdotes -- and in all the performances. But many of the stories turn out to be highly predictable. And much of the theory the group derives from its encounters strikes one as tosh, a way of distancing experience rather than processing it. One would like to think Arcand is ironist enough to have intended this effect, but his film offers other evidence. He seems to think of himself less as a north woods Arthur Schnitzler than as Ingmar Bergman in one of his more sententious moods. By Richard Schickel

POLICE

Gerard Depardieu is the Stanley Kowalski of French actors. While his colleagues mince and mewl their way through roles, declaiming erudite ideals in coffee-shop whispers, Depardieu rampages like a bull just liberated from the picador's lance. Ever since Going Places in 1974, Depardieu has embodied the spirit of anarchy -- physical, political, sexual, intellectual -- for a country that likes to think it bottled the stuff. In The Last Woman (1976) he played a goatish guy who capriciously castrates himself; in the current Menage he is a thief with the soul of a schoolgirl, falling in lust with the mousy husband of the woman he has just taken to bed. Depardieu is the irresistible force of primal man meeting the immovable object of Gallic sangfroid. Because he is also a restless, fearless actor, the collision usually makes for exciting cinema.

And when Depardieu plays a lawman -- here, for example, as a detective worming into the Paris underworld in search of a Tunisian drug syndicate -- he will surely expose the man's emotional complicity in the evil he is meant to uproot. A widower with no known social life, Detective Mangin pours all of his intensity into his work. Every interrogation is an assault, every stakeout a seduction. The women in the case are objects of awe and scorn for him, especially Noria (Sophie Marceau), a moll who can beat Mangin at his games because she spots his lurking vulnerability, and Lydie (Sandrine Bonnaire), a young whore who can amaze him with her prodigious cynicism. The brutal detective still has a child's capacity for innocent pain; it can come close to breaking him even as he breaks the case.

Director Maurice Pialat (Loulou, A Nos Amours) and Screenwriter Catherine Breillat know that police work is more talk than action, and they allow the third-degree sessions to wear down the viewer as well the suspect. The cumulative effect, though, is bracing. Police is a stark vision of a forlorn specialist, doomed to be brilliant at his job. Depardieu is too.-- R.C.

BETTY BLUE

She is neurotically generous. She is neurotically needy. We all know about people like Betty Blue: in movies, though not necessarily in life, they come to a bad end. Indeed, much of the suspense in this high-fevered melodrama revolves around whether that end will arrive sooner or later, and just how painful it will be.

Yet one ends up caring about Betty, because Writer-Director Jean-Jacques Beineix keeps coiling the story of her last months tighter and tighter until the tension is unbearable. Also, Beatrice Dalle as Betty and Jean-Hugues Anglade as Zorg, her bewitched and befuddled lover, bring mesmerizing intensity to their work.

The movie begins under false, bright colors at a beach colony where Zorg is the caretaker, and glad enough to have an attractive girl come into his life. The sex here is very naked and bluntly erotic -- a few minutes of careless sex unmediated by commitment or guilt. For a while the movie seems like another study of love along what is left of the hippie margin. But no, it moves toward ever darker, more claustrophobic interiors as Betty realizes that the lackadaisical Zorg cannot absorb all of her energies. She discovers that he once wrote, and abandoned, a novel. She will type out the manuscript and get the masterpiece off to the publishers. When the rejections pile up, she focuses her hopes on motherhood. When her pregnancy proves to be false, the only place to turn is inward, toward self-destruction. It is a fine irony that Zorg achieves a passion to answer hers only when he must help her complete her botched suicide.

In 1982 Beineix attracted 15 minutes of overattention with his emptily stylish Diva. A year later he stubbed his ego on the contumely of critics when his next film, The Moon in the Gutter, was hooted out of the Cannes Film Festival. Both films were arias of adolescent male obsession with the fatal mystery of womanhood, a theme that Betty Blue investigates more maturely, more dangerously. There is doubtless a feminist parable to be found here, and criticism to be made of its too schematic structure. But the film is full of quirky incident and compassionate humor. What might have repelled ultimately compels. -- R.S.