BEYOND BELIEF

By RICHARD CORLISS

Dr. Laura Bowman seems in a perpetual Burma daze. In 1988 Laura (Patricia Arquette), the heroine of Beyond Rangoon, is with a group of tourists who want to get out of Burma before the thugs who run the place start killing everyone. But Laura has not recovered from a personal trauma back home, and when her group leaves she just...stays there. It's a pretty region--like the Mekong Delta in the mid-'60s. Now if only she can find an escort. Why, here's an amiable native (U Aung Ko). "Hello," he says, in effect, "I'm an illegal guide in a military dictatorship, and I'd like to plop you into a genocidal civil war." "Hello," she virtually replies, "I'm a shell-shocked ninny. Let's go."

The history of Myanmar, as Burma is now called, resonates with melodrama and tragedy. The heroic battle of Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for her nonviolent resistance against the ruling junta, is surely worth a movie. But in Hollywood the problems of one little country--or one big country with little brown people--don't amount to a hill of unsold scripts. The Burmese must have a Caucasian mediator, Laura, whose sufferings illuminate those of the locals.

Director John Boorman, an artist-adventurer with an eye for pictorial rapture and social turmoil, brought this sort of scenario alive in The Emerald Forest. Not so here, where he lapses into banal visual stereotyping: the rebels are thin, winsome, saintly, while the nasty soldiers have bad skin and potbellies.

Cast at the last minute (after Meg Ryan left to make another American-twit-abroad epic, French Kiss), Arquette can do little but whine and pine in an impossible role. And the film simply forfeits belief with its notion that Laura, who stumbles through Burma like a girl in a monster movie after she's seen the giant ants, is a physician. She hardly seems smart enough to be a patient.

--R.C.