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R: ARCHIVE, S: REVIEWS, D: 09/12/1996,

Jude

If you've ever longed to see the characters in English costume dramas burst passionately from their corsets, Jude is the flick for you. In adapting Thomas Hardy's hundred-year-old novel Jude the Obscure, director Michael Winterbottom and screenwriter Hossein Amini have stripped the story of its weightier themes and archaic dialogue in order to present a raw, familiar love-triangle tragedy whose period trappings and doom-laden atmosphere merely heighten its exotic, romantic appeal. Jude Fawley (Shallow Grave's Christopher Eccleston), Hardy's inarticulate stonecutter who longs for a university education, becomes a brooding hunk. Arabella (Muriel's Wedding's Rachel Griffiths), the country wench who marries and abandons him, becomes an upwardly mobile seductress. And Sue Bridehead (Sense and Sensibility's Kate Winslet), the dithery cousin with whom Jude falls fatally in love, becomes a passionate free spirit.

Amini's script plays down Hardy's condemnation of Victorian sexual hypocrisy and class rigidity in order to focus on the lovers' dangerous flouting of social strictures. Winterbottom attacks the story with the same blunt, brutal force of his Butterfly Kiss, though without that film's grimy ugliness, thanks to Eduardo Serra's burnished cinematography, which makes Jude look as sexy as a fashion shoot. Still, the elemental power of Hardy's tragedy remains, and the performers, particularly Winslet, are strong and moving as characters who struggle mightily against the blind implacability of destiny. Screens Friday at the Kendall Square at 7 and 9:45 p.m., and on Saturday at noon and 3 p.m. Director Michael Winterbottom and star Christopher Eccleston will appear at tonight's 7 p.m. showing.

-- Gary Susman