Oy vey. The Sound of Music meets The Nanny in this badly titled yet unexpectedly amusing film. Joy Miller (Fran Drescher) is a New York City beauty-school teacher reveling in the joys of liquid eyeliner and flammable hairspray when she is inadvertently plucked from her native Queens to Slovetzia, a tiny country in Eastern Europe.

Boris (Timothy Dalton, in sad post-007 mode), the autocratic dictator of Slovetzia, hires Joy to be the governess of his four children, and with her brash American ways she soon turns the stodgy post-Communist regime upside down. From educating factory workers on the finer points of unionization to outfitting the Stalinesque Boris in Yves Saint Laurent, Joy is a democratic whirlwind in capri pants.

This tired fish-out-of water plot has been done before, but Drescher -- with her Easter-egg-colored ensembles, iridescent make-up, and, of course, that voice -- breathes new life into what could have been a warped Julie Andrews impersonation. And though the film takes more formulaic turns than Drescher's fake eyelashes, it certainly makes the most of her unlikely charm. At the Copley Place, the Fresh Pond, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.