A REAL SUMMER BREAK

By RICHARD CORLISS

On 10,000 screens across the continent, dinosaurs devour doggies, serial killers hijack planes, cruise ships come thisclose to exploding. And a week before the solstice, a few moviegoers are already sick of summer. There's got to be something better than this: brain food, not eye candy. Perhaps some ambition, boldness, a little variety for our palette. To the rescue comes a quartet of foreign-language films--remember them?--in French and Farsi, Mandarin and Japanese. These movies will be in only a few dozen U.S. theaters. But seeing them could convince you that summer really is a season of fullness.

Perhaps a semidocumentary about the nomadic Ghashghai goatherds and carpetmakers of southeastern Iran is not your idea of a fun night at the 'plex. Yet Mohsen Makhmalbaf's Gabbeh is a visual wonder, folkloric and folk-lyrical. Color has rarely been used so sumptuously as in this fable of Gabbeh (Shaghayegh Djodat), a beautiful young woman whose marriage to a dashing horseman her father keeps postponing. Gabbeh means carpet, and the young woman is a kind of textile goddess weaving a spell over the proceedings. She must watch the painful birth of a calf, the playful bickering of an old couple, and the death of a little girl who has chased after lost sheep, as a backdrop to her own desperate longings.

The story is the merest excuse for a rhapsody of textures: of the carpets, the wheat fields, the clouds, the streams in which the peasants dip their dyes. Color is almost a religion here. A charismatic teacher points out a classroom window to "the red of a poppy, the blue of God's heaven, the yellow of the sun that lights up the world," and these colors magically appear on his hands, as if he'd dipped them in a world still damp from Nature's first spectacular paint job. "Life is color!" he shouts, as exuberant as an Iranian Zorba. "Love is color!" The movie screen becomes a canvas, and this brief (75 minutes), gorgeous little film splashes life and love onto it.

The notion that a film's look and tone can be its subject is, well, foreign to Hollywood directors, for whom the basic elements are a propulsive story and some slambang special effects. But as Chen Kaige shows in the humid, tumid Temptress Moon, image is all. Reuniting the stars (Hong Kong's Leslie Cheung and the mainland's Gong Li) of his 1993 Farewell My Concubine, Chen paints a glamorous portrait of drugs and decadence in 1920s China. The leaders of today's China, addicted to the old narcotic of Maoism, may have seen the film as an unflattering mirror of themselves; a year after its completion, Temptress Moon is still banned.

In the film's first scene, an unseen plutocrat tells his young daughter, "Opium is the source of all inspiration." He blows the sweet smoke in her face, which creases into a sickly smile. Opium is the curse of the House of Pang. Those who surrender to it will corrupt the children of the palace, Ruyi (Gong Li) and Zhong-liang (Cheung), creating a new generation of addicts. As grownups, these adult children will stare into the camera, their only confidant, to express their impotent rage; and their faces will be streaked with tears as chic as pearl drops.

Chen's theme, from his first film, Yellow Earth (1984), has been the indoctrination of children--and, often, their misuse by those who should care for them (read: the state). But he has never illustrated it as voluptuously as here. He and ace cinematographer Christopher Doyle bathe Gong Li in warm reds, giving her a fever of frustrated love, and surround Cheung with cold grays to reflect the ice of his resentment. As the slick gigolo and avenging angel of the Pang family, Cheung radiates the intensity of a lover scorned and scarred for life. In a performance that dares to avoid sentiment and sympathy, Cheung is the anchor for this mesmerizing essay in love and betrayal.

All right, it's summer. You want a foreign-language film that doesn't play like a final exam in Comparative Cultures. So try Shall We Dance?, which Miramax Films has cannily positioned as successor to its easygoing humanist hits Like Water for Chocolate and Il Postino. Masayuki Suo's romantic comedy, the winner of 13 Japanese Academy Awards, at times teeters dangerously close to the excesses of another Miramax crowd pleaser, Strictly Ballroom. The film has such a weakness for the easy incongruity (short men dancing with tall women--isn't that hilarious?) that it could almost be Australian. But Shall We Dance? also has an emotional gravity; it is grounded in a middle-aged man's nagging belief that he has one last chance to grab at life.

Mr. Sugiyama (Koji Yakusho) is an accountant who appears ready to accept joylessness as his lot until, on the street one night, he sees a vision: a beautiful woman (Tamiyo Kusakari) in the second-floor window of a dance class. Her ballerina grace, her poise and a secret stately sadness devastate him. Whether or not he can dance, his heart does.

Thus begins a chaste affair of the feet. Sugiyama takes ballroom classes at which he is pathetically inept, and it is ages before his dream girl agrees to help him (in a lovely montage scored to the Drifters' Save the Last Dance for Me). As he practices his steps--at his desk, in the subway, under a bridge in the mild rain --the zombie is revived. "Every day I feel so alive," he says. "Even being tired feels great." His rejuvenation lasts one act too many, but it has a satisfying payoff, to the tune of guess-which Rodgers and Hammerstein tune. For a beguiling summer movie treat, bring hankies, a dance partner and a pair of polished black shoes.

And for flat-out devastation, see the French drama Ponette, Jacques Doillon's study of infant grief. From its poignant first image--of a four-year-old child (Victoire Thivisol) compulsively sucking her thumb, the only part of her forearm not in a cast after a crash that killed her mother--the film rarely leaves the wracked, haunted face of its fearless heroine. Many relatives think they are helping the girl: her aunt (Claire Nebout), who fills her with stories of God's craving for mommies; her young cousins, who try alternately teasing and cheering her; a boy at school who says, "You killed your mom because you're mean." But Ponette is inconsolable. When told, "You shouldn't be so sad," she properly replies, "Yes, I should."

Ponette is no simple moper. The most sanctified movie masochist since Robert Bresson's Mouchette, she is on her own childhood Calvary, a quest to find her mother in this life or the next. The sight of a child digging furiously into cemetery dirt may upset some viewers; others will wonder if Doillon's manipulation of little Victoire's emotions doesn't come close to child abuse. But it is an amazing performance, or acting out, that expresses the human need for something to believe in. For Ponette it is her mother, an embracing vision of purity and security. The little girl needs a miracle, and finally she gets it--for real, or in her dreams--in an epiphany that leaves her and the audience exhausted, exalted, cleansed.

All four of these fine films are stories about loss--of a lover, of childhood, of vitality, of a parent. Where a Hollywood movie would see some form of apocalyptic revenge as the answer to these discontents, foreign directors look for solutions grounded in daily experience. The films may be fantastic or melodramatic, lighthearted or soul-splitting; the people in them may look exotic and speak other languages. Yet compared with the heroes of U.S. films, they are closer to us--almost inside us. They offer artful lessons in getting through a summer, or a life.