Faith/Off (1998)

Talk about hedging bets. In The Governess (Sony Pictures Classics), Minnie Driver plays Rosina da Silva, a young Sephardic Jewish woman living in London in the 1840s. With her curly dark hair and Modigliani eyes, Driver certainly looks ''ethnic'' enough to pass as Jewish, and, in the early scenes, where she's saucy and full of life, it appears as if she might make the novelty casting work as compellingly as Renee Zellweger did in A Price Above Rubies. Then comes the hedge. Desperate for money, Rosina passes herself off as a gentile named Mary Blackchurch, landing a job at a remote Scottish mansion, where she becomes governess for a family so dour and civilized that she seems to have entered a castle of WASP vampires. In voice-over, Rosina tells us, ''I feel the word Jewess must be emblazoned on my forehead!'' She must be the only one who feels that way, since she soon begins to speak in elegant dulcet tones and conduct herself with the kind of liquid-wristed decorum it takes centuries of etiquette classes to breed.

The Governess is a have-your-kugel-and-eat-it-too princess fantasy, the tale of an earthy, passionate Jew who beats the WASPs at their own game. Rosina is assigned the charge of a bratty young girl, but her focus shifts to the family patriarch (Tom Wilkinson), who's obsessed with his pioneering studies in photography. Rosina poses for him, gives him a few technical pointers (such as dreaming up the idea of a darkroom -- hey, those Jews are smart), and seduces him. If The Governess gave us any sense that Rosina was wrestling with her identity, trying to adapt her spirit to a foreign world, it might have generated some drama. But writer-director Sandra Goldbacher, a former BBC documentarian, fills the film with arid pauses, creating a claustrophobic study in ''repression.'' She glorifies her heroine at every turn, but Minnie Driver, by now, doesn't need glorification. She needs a role that will let us see what's going on behind those eyes. C

-- OG

[BOX]

The Governess STARRING Minnie Driver Tom Wilkinson RATED R 114 MINUTES

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