Coming from the filmmaker who gave us the scintillating ''Angels and Insects'' (also starring Scott Thomas), bug cameos may be expected. But unlike the strong spell of eroticism and Victorian perversity in that 1995 adaptation of an A.S. Byatt novella, this dramatization of a novel by W. Somerset Maugham never settles on a tone, either about love or war.
Porcelain-fine Scott Thomas drifts as widowed Mary Panton, sleepwalking through life while holed up in a borrowed villa. Oh, the conundrums she must contemplate in her teacup! There's an offer of marriage from an older diplomatic chap (James Fox) with a lip so stiff as to appear paralyzed with Botox; there's her meddling neighbor to cosset, a gossipy American expat wed to Italian royalty (and, as declaimed in rouge and rictus smile by Anne Bancroft, a must-imitate for any discriminating drag queen). But she's drawn to a married American (Sean Penn), and she's got a crisis brewing with a grungy Austrian refugee (Jeremy Davies) whom she sleeps with out of pity, and who, when she refuses him a second night, snaps.
Whatever will Mary do? Will she ever thaw? Scott Thomas opens her lovely eyes wide, but she's unreadable and distant, dulled in a script full of twit-speak, no matter what fire the excellent Penn ignites in her direction. That fly on the window Haas likes so much may be squeaking ''Help me!''
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