The line is also a key to the particular perspective Armstrong brings the story. It seems reductive to call her a feminist filmmaker, as if she viewed her characters and material through the narrow slits of ideology. What is true is that no director has more consistently brought a woman's viewpoint, a woman's experience and an acute perception of female rites of passage to the movies. There's a beautiful example of that in "High Tide," when Judy Davis crouches down to spy on the teenage daughter she abandoned years before as the girl shaves her legs for the first time.

In "Charlotte Gray" Armstrong is combining a romantic wartime melodrama with the story of a woman coming into possession of her strength and capability. This is perhaps the only war movie I've ever seen where women are treated as men's equals in the fight. That wouldn't have been possible in a movie that took place on the battlefield, where women didn't fight, but it is possible in a story about the Resistance.

The idea of women's equality is so instinctive a concept to Armstrong that she never resorts to special pleading. When Charlotte endangers a mission by going to get information from her contact (Ron Cook, as a seedy little man whose work in wartime intelligence suggests a better side he isn't totally able to quell), we know she deserves the chewing-out she gets from Julien. She's taken on a serious job and she's expected to live up to it.

Armstrong focuses not only on the ways Charlotte's sex makes her war experience different but the way it leads her to different actions, as when she risks her life to provide comfort to the two little Jewish boys in hiding at Levade's farmhouse. Her actions are a fantasy of female nobility, no less sentimental than a male fantasy of glory on the battlefield, though there's no denying its emotional punch. Armstrong wants to put a woman on the same footing that male veterans of WWII have claimed, of being forever changed by what they did and what they saw. And she succeeds brilliantly.

There are flaws that Armstrong doesn't overcome. It makes no sense that an agent of the Resistance working in secret would make himself so obvious by publicly taunting the German troops as they march in, as Julien does at one point. And so much time is spent on Charlotte's being fluent in French that it's a real boner that, when she gets to France, the movie proceeds in English. Couldn't Armstrong have come up with a device to swiftly deal with that problem -- say, beginning a scene in French and then slowly drowning out the dialogue and bringing the sound up with the actors having switched to English?

But none of those problems do much to erode the movie's pleasure. The cinematography, by Dion Beebe, bathes the movie in autumnal colors. We know there's an overlay of nostalgia on the images, that we're seeing occupied France through the romance of the Resistance. Even Levade's crumbling rural farmhouse looks sumptuous.

The look, though, is part of the movie's seduction, and since it makes you feel pampered, the way films from the studio era often did, who wants to complain? Armstrong's pacing is just right, giving both a sense of the story unfolding and of events happening so fast that instinct takes over. The climax of a subplot involving a schoolteacher who collaborates with the Germans occurs so abruptly that, even though we know what's about to happen, we're unprepared for it and the moment carries a jolt.

Nobody pulls off a movie like "Charlotte Gray" without the right stars. And if Billy Crudup seems constrained and ill-at-ease (his look is too much raw-boned American to make him believable as a European), then Blanchett carries the entire movie on her immaculately outfitted shoulders. It's an absolutely smashing piece of movie-star acting, depending as much on her glamour as on her talent. She has never looked more beautiful than she does here. In the staggering "The Lord of the Rings," director Peter Jackson uses the oddness of Blanchett's beauty perfectly: She's both ethereal and menacing, delicate and hard, unearthly in the truest sense.

In "Charlotte Gray" Blanchett is called on to carry off classic movie charisma, and it appears effortless. Blanchett looks great in her tailored suits and hats, but it's the mixture of fortitude and raw nerves that give the performance its nearly tremulous quality.

Charlotte moves from being a rather prim girl, almost piously serious about the war effort, to a woman who realizes that her earlier earnestness meant nothing without being tested by experience. Blanchett pulls off that transition without giving in to the temptation to act falsely noble in the Greer Garson tradition. Charlotte is too much a scared human being to be inhumanly brave.

Blanchett is particularly suited to playing an undercover agent because she wears her emotions plainly on her face; Charlotte always seems in danger of exposing herself. And though she does very little in the film's closing scenes, set after the war, she conveys the sense of someone who has been irrevocably changed. There's a new gravity in the way she walks, a more watchful manner.

The performance is beautifully in synch with Armstrong's direction. Both Armstrong's and Blanchett's work here represent a triumph of old-style -- and maybe clichid -- movie pleasures redeemed by craft and taste, and by the passion they are brushed with, too. This is a movie that wants to sweep the audience into its grip. (It's the best date movie around right now.) "Charlotte Gray" is redolent with luxurious, old-fashioned pleasures. All we have to do is surrender to them.

Recent Stories