WHEN EROTIC HEAT TURNS INTO LOVE LIGHT

By RICHARD CORLISS

Lit crits, those old prunes, scratched their high foreheads at the success of Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. This tale of middle-age passion -- in which a roving photographer, Robert Kincaid, has a volcanic three-day affair with Francesca Johnson, an Italian woman who has lived for 20 years as an Iowa farmwife -- was filled with clichas masquerading as erotic eruptions. But Waller knows the secret of romance novels. He writes the way people feel and think when they are first in love-as if every emotion had the force of God's creation, as if such shivers had never been experienced or expressed before. Madison County was like the affair it describes: a brief skinny-dip in the warm lake of nostalgia.

In one sense, Clint Eastwood's film version was doomed before it started, for the book's readers had played the movie version in their heads, cast the roles, lived the love scenes. Also, today's films have a sophisticated language for the depiction of violence but become tongue-tied when the subject is serious eroticism. Told from Francesca's point of view, the book runs its words over Robert's body as if they were the fingers or lips of a new lover. He is hard, an animal, physical and spiritual. Her orgasms are liberating, exhausting visits to a land where he is king. ("Robert," she exclaims in postcoital awe, "you're so powerful, it's frightening!") In the age of facetiousness, could any director film this without giggling? Would any actor dare display himself as such a paragon of pagan love?

Not Eastwood. He is the most reticent of directors -- where the book ogles, the film discreetly observes -- and, here, the courtliest of stars. The movie has a scene in which Francesca watches Robert wash himself. But Clint would never let the camera play over his body. Nor, as director, would he be anything but protective of Streep's corporal mortality. The two stars are past miming youth's sleek exertions. Why do it now? They didn't do it then.

What's left is a brooding romantic fantasy. As scripted by Richard LaGravenese (The Fisher King), the Madison County movie has a slightly riper theme than the book's. It is about the anticipation and consequences of passion-the slow dance of appraisal, of waiting to make a move that won't be rejected, of debating what to do when the erotic heat matures into love light. What is the effect of an affair on a woman who has been faithful to her husband, and on a rootless man who only now realizes he needs the one woman he can have but not hold?

These are issues worth considering at length and leisure. Eastwood does; he is a man who likes to take his time. The picture clocks in at 2 1/4 hours -- a span in which anyone who got past 10th grade could read the book, linger over favorite passages and smoke a reflective cigarette afterward. Part of this time is wasted on a framing story about the affair's impact decades later on Francesca's grown children. The rest is lavished on the warming of two stars and styles as they reach accommodation.

Eastwood behaves; Streep acts. He relaxes into a role; she wills herself into it, like a woman determined to make a dress two sizes too small look stunning on her. This time she tries on a southern Italian accent, with the weary, knowing lilt of an Anna Magnani. Soon she is Francesca -- or some rarefied version of her -- aching but not expecting to find someone who can tap her gift for love. Before she commits to the affair, you understand her tension, her indecision. In a medley of bold and subtle gestures, Streep tells Francesca's plaintive story. Through the actress's effort and her director's generosity, this book about an irresistible man becomes a movie about a remarkable woman. Madison County is Eastwood's gift to women: to Francesca, to all the girls he's loved before-and to Streep, who alchemizes literary mawkishness into intelligent movie passion.