When I ask whether there is something essentially French about their movies, Ducastel says, "I think so, maybe." But Martineau insists: "People in France do not understand us either. We are a gay couple, we make all different kinds of movies. We make light films with serious backgrounds. When critics ask us: 'Don't serious moviemakers make serious movies?' we say no. That is totally wrong."

"Even French people think that sexuality is a very serious matter," says Ducastel. "Jacques has a theory about that." Martineau arches his eyebrows skeptically. "Yes?" he says. "I have theories?"

"Yes, you have a theory that heterosexuals think that sex is important because it's related to procreation," says Ducastel. "Gays are more free about sex because it's not related to anything useful. It's just pleasure."

Martineau brushes this away. "Sex is not a moral thing. It's just physical pleasure." Now it's Ducastel's turn to sound dubious: "That is your theory?"

"Yes," says Martineau, before catching himself: "No, no, no, that's Diderot. Diderot wrote that, two and a half centuries ago. There's no reason to consider it a serious matter. The question of identity is a serious matter. But that's only partly related to our sexuality. And here is what we especially have to say: It's not a moral issue. That is a totally different question. To be good or bad doesn't depend on your sexual activities. That's only a story of skin."

Côte D'Azur" opens Sept. 9 in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and the San Francisco Bay Area; Sept. 16 in Boston and Washington; Sept. 23 in San Diego; Sept. 30 in Palm Springs, Calif., and Seattle; and Oct. 7 in Dallas, Denver, Detroit and Minneapolis, with other cities to follow.

"The Weeping Meadow": A passionate and unforgiving history, from the last of the High Art dinosaurs
Those of us who can still remember the art-film landscape of the '70s and '80s (or earlier) are feeling our mortality these days. Buñuel, Kurosawa, Fellini and Tarkovsky are long dead. Bergman is retired (again) and pushing 90, although not without having made one more great movie. Godard and Antonioni are pale imitations of what they once were, which may say more than a little about their enduring value. Maybe the bigger lesson here is to let go of the Great White Man theory of cinema (and of history). But for those who aren't quite ready -- and I'm talking to myself here -- there's still Theo Angelopoulos.

If you haven't seen any of Angelopoulos' acknowledged masterpieces -- I'd count "The Travelling Players," "Landscape in the Mist" and probably "Ulysses' Gaze" -- you owe them to yourself. I say that in total seriousness, and then I also say: Who the hell has time? These are the kinds of movies that demand your entire attention for an entire evening, and then want you to spend the next day hanging around with your friends, drinking coffee and talking about your role in the life of this planet, the past or future deaths of people you love, whether the evil of the 20th century outweighed the good and (not least of all) what that long movie you just saw has to do with it all.

I wanted some version of that fellowship after seeing "The Weeping Meadow," I can tell you that much. This is the opening film in a proposed trilogy about the history of modern Greece, which Angelopoulos (now 70) has said will be his final films. It's a gorgeous and resonant work, full of the memorable images and passages of pathos the director's fans expect. It's also a painful, unforgiving film, the kind of thing that sharply divides audiences from critics, and whenever that happens I get the uncomfortable feeling that neither side should be entirely proud of their reaction.

Our heroine, if that's even the right word, is Eleni, whom we first meet as a young orphan girl picked up by Greek refugees in 1919, on their way out of the Russian city of Odessa. Driven out by the Bolshevik Revolution, Odessa's Greeks have returned to their ancestral homeland to live in a marshy no-man's-land along a riverbank near Thessaloniki. Eleni and Alexis grow up as brother and sister in the household of Spyros (Vassilis Kolovos), a leader of this desolate community, but since they're not actually related, other kinds of bonds form between them by the time they're teenagers.

As adults, Eleni (Alexandra Aidini) and Alexis (Nikos Poursadinis) make a strikingly handsome couple, and have pledged themselves to each other. They long to reclaim their twin sons (adopted by a rich family) and, like couples the world over, make a new world together. But the cruel tides of 20th century history will swirl them toward unknown destinations. When Spyros' wife dies, he claims Eleni for himself; when she elopes with Alexis (who actually is Spyros' son) after the wedding, a taboo has been violated and a long, slow curse is set in motion that optimism, love and good intentions can do nothing to break.

I can feel the pressure of symbolism in "The Weeping Meadow," without quite being able to grasp it: Is Angelopoulos suggesting that modern Greek history is a story of generational warfare and patricide, of unresolvable conflict between repressive tradition and reckless modernism? That sounds plausible, but it's just a guess. What I do know is that the film is packed with wonder and cruelty, with the Greek music the director loves so dearly, with vivid images of the overcrowded camaraderie of refugee-packed Thessaloniki in the years between the great wars.

Something about Angelopoulos' historical vision here feels pretty cold and distant, as if he's looking at Eleni and Alexis the way a scientist views specimens under a microscope. Sometimes we hurry along through helpful expository scenes, as characters explain that the workers are planning a general strike, or the fascists are seizing power, or that the terrible civil war that followed World War II is in fact terrible. Sometimes we dwell on the tragic ultra-long shot: a group of indistinguishable women on a distant battlefield, discovering the bodies of their husbands, sons and brothers.

I'm not suggesting that any of this is aesthetically inappropriate: Angelopoulos' homeland definitely had a rough century, as European nations go. But as a practical matter, "The Weeping Meadow" doesn't offer quite enough sugar for its harsh medicine to go down easily. This is unquestionably the opening chapter of an extended, important work, and I'll probably work up the courage to see it again. But please be forewarned. Even setting aside the fact that Eleni and Alexis' hometown is abandoned to rising floodwaters, "The Weeping Meadow" principally offers us human dreams ground to dust, history as a process of barest survival but not (so far) of redemption.

"The Weeping Meadow" opens Sept. 14 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York, with a national release to follow.

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