''Far From Heaven,'' the new film by Todd Haynes, is a period piece, but not the period you might think. The film is set in the 1950s, and the cars, the clothes, the hair, and the hats would seem to vouch for that. But take a closer look. The colors of the autumn leaves pop with a feverish Technicolor urgency, the swank home decor threatens to crowd the characters out of the frame, the behavior is just a bit too outre. This is not the '50s; this is the movie '50s. 

Specifically, ''Far From Heaven'' - the best film of the year to date, incidentally - is a nearly fetishistic recreation of the films of Douglas Sirk, the director of plush melodramas that were box-office bonanzas during the Eisenhower era. Films such as ''All That Heaven Allows'' (1955), ''Written on the Wind'' (1956), and the aptly named ''Imitation of Life'' (1959) were derided by critics of the time as mindless soap, but they have since been reclaimed by academics, filmmakers, cultural theorists, and movie lovers of all persuasions. 

Haynes isn't alone in looking backward: ''Far From Heaven'' is just the most recent, and extreme, example of a filmmaker mining cinema's past to fashion work that lives and breathes in the present. The trend ties into a larger shift toward pre-counterculture values - in politics as well as pop culture - that in the arts hides behind a protectively hip stance of irony. 

More to the point, the generation of post-VHS filmmakers steeped in the medium was bound to produce some who wanted to recast what they grew up on, whether out of nostalgia, love of a challenge, or, as in the case of ''Heaven,'' a desire to slip caustic social commentary into what only appears to be an over-the-top weepie. (That this was Sirk's game plan for his own films makes Haynes's approach all the more honorable.) 

Understand that we're not talking about remakes, but a deeper sort of cinematic reanimation. The urge to remake is usually studio-driven: An executive peers into the vaults, realizes his company owns the rights to a classic, and decides to dust it off with the latest hot stars. The urge to re- create, on the other hand, almost always rises from an individual director's imagination and willpower. 

In some cases, directors are using retro as just one color on the canvas. The first half of Paul Schrader's ''Auto Focus'' is a cheery, primary-color re-creation of early-'60s sitcom optimism precisely so that Bob Crane's lurid fall from grace will seem more ''real.'' Even a slab of horror-movie junk such as ''Ghost Ship'' opens with a surprise: a credit sequence with music and pink title letters that could come straight out of a Doris Day movie (don't worry, the gore is quick to follow). 

Other directors go whole hog, though, and for some it can be a tonic. Take ''The Truth About Charlie,'' in theory a remake of ''Charade,'' the chic 1963 comic thriller starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. In practice, director Jonathan Demme has crafted ''Charlie'' as a contemporary take on the ambience and camera techniques of classic French New Wave films such as Truffaut's ''Shoot the Piano Player,'' a clip of which appears in ''Charlie'' and whose lead actor, Charles Aznavour, pops up twice to serenade stars Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg. 

On a more personal level, ''Charlie'' represents Demme's valiant if not completely successful attempt to recapture the funky, any-which-way humanism of his 1980s work - the wonderful ''Something Wild,'' ''Stop Making Sense,'' and ''Married to the Mob'' - before an Oscar for ''Silence of the Lambs'' led to the coffee-table propriety of ''Philadelphia'' and ''Beloved.'' You can feel Demme reaching back to Truffaut to replenish his own creative juices, and if the results are mixed this time, the attempt bodes well for his future. 

It's always a bit of a mad-scientist gamble, though, and occasionally a filmmaker blows his fingers off. Gus Van Sant's literal, shot-by-shot 1998 remake of ''Psycho'' was a straight-up lab experiment that asked the question: What would happen if you made a Hitchcock movie without Hitchcock? The answer was a film that pleased no one and that torpedoed Van Sant's artistic credibility in the bargain. 

Francois Ozon's ''8 Women'' takes the opposite tack: It's beholden to no one movie, director, or genre so much as the whole continuum of 20th-century French pop culture. There are at least three levels of re-creation going on here - of drawing-room murder mysteries, pop musicals, and melodramas - and some of them are only accessible tto French audiences: For many US viewers, the interest level plummets whenever one of the actresses launches into a song that plucks European strings of nostalgia only. 

''8 Women'' works for us, instead, as a Rubik's Cube of French film history, placing Danielle Darrieux from the 1940s next to Catherine Deneuve from the 1960s next to Isabelle Huppert from the 1970s next to Fanny Ardant from the 1980s, and so on. Ozon's film is a mash note to its cast and the movies in which they've appeared. 

By contrast, audiences don't really have to know from Douglas Sirk to appreciate what Haynes is up to in ''Far From Heaven.'' Even if they haven't seen ''All That Heaven Allows,'' the Sirk classic that provides the new film's narrative, visual, and emotional DNA, most people will instantly recognize the plastic, high-'50s world Haynes re-creates: the martini glasses and Chevrolet fins and bright, shallow responses to human pain. 

Some may think that the only possible response to this world is to guffaw at it, as years of ''Nick at Night'' ads have primed us to do. But ''Far From Heaven'' is no simple Beaver Cleaver parody, nor is it an empty exercise in style like Van Sant's ''Psycho.'' Instead, Haynes has reanimated Sirk's movie world for the express purpose of telling an intensely empathetic story of a woman who becomes a social outcast by following her heart. 

Drawn in by the compelling hyperrealism of the film's surface, we follow suburban housewife Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) as her life unravels when she recognizes an emotional kinship with her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert), even as her husband (Dennis Quaid) questions his own sexuality. A plot this full-throttle would prompt snorts of disbelief if it were set in the modern world, or in a period setting using current, more realistic filmmaking techniques. But by re-creating the movie '50s in all their feverish glory, Haynes allows us access to a more potent emotional identification with Cathy, one that prompts tears of shared dismay rather than laughter. 

And even from within its gaudy, sealed universe, ''Far From Heaven'' scores points about taboos that exist in 2002: Quaid agonizes over private desires and public appearance, while Moore and Haysbert never so much as share an on-screen kiss even though they yearn to. 

In Sirk's films, it's the yearning that matters - a piercing emotional longing that can burn a hole through Technicolor kitsch and keen with the incandescence of art. This would be the last thing you would think a filmmaker could replicate, but Haynes nails it, and that makes his film more than re-creation in any sense of the word. 

Ty Burr can be reached at [email protected]. 

    It has been an unhappy autumn here behind studio gates. The gloom commenced when "Stuart Little 2," pre-sold as the summer's hit kid flick, nose-dived into the toilet. 

    Next came "The Scorpion King," the latest installment in the "Mummy" series. It grossed less than half of what its predecessor did.

    Conventional wisdom held that Sony Pictures' just-released Eddie Murphy-Owen Wilson action comedy "I Spy" was a surefire hit -- given its star power and the cult popularity of its namesake TV series.

    By last weekend, the $70 million-budgeted film had grossed only $25 million, with audiences shrinking.

    The message from these and other recently unsuccessful remakes may be that a long-held industry maxim -- that remakes have built-in audience brand loyalty -- is going the way of Prince Val haircuts.

    Hollywood is currently infatuated with the concept of branding, deaf to Madison Avenue's warning that consumers, particularly young ones, care less than ever about brands. 

    What they care most about -- terrifying news -- is quality.

    Writers blame Hollywood's increasing reliance on recycled material on risk-averse out-of-date studio suits cocooned behind a fawning cadre of junior development executives -- mostly non-writers who typically talk or otherwise negotiate their way into their jobs and are notorious for their inability to recognize a good screenplay after they pretend to read it.

    Thus the famously craven writer's pitch to executives: "It's just like [hit movie], but completely different."

    Gus Van Sant tried delivering on that promise with his recent shot-for-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's classic thriller "Psycho." Audiences failed to see the point.

    Producer Edward R. Pressman, whose films "Das Boot," "Plenty," "Wall Street" and "Reversal of Fortune" won Oscar notices, says, "There's no reason to remake something that's been done so well that anything that comes after it would pale by comparison." 

    In Hollywood, however, reason routinely takes a back seat to ego. Case in point: British director Guy Ritchie and spouse Madonna, whose recent remake of director Lina Wertmuller's wonderfully original 1975 hit "Swept Away," "Love, Sex, Drugs & Money," chalked up less than $600,000 before distributors pulled it.

    Director Jonathan Demme's admiration for Stanley Donen's 1963 romantic thriller "Charade," which starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant at their best, didn't translate into an audience-pleasing remake.

    Demme's recent "The Truth About Charlie," starring Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton, appears to have flopped.

    Writing last Sunday about the lackluster performance of recent remakes, Los Angeles Times movie industry columnist Patrick Goldstein put it bluntly. 

    "Maybe getting audiences to spend $9.50 for a half-baked update of a (fill in the blank: TV spy show/'30s adventure movie/'60s thriller/'70s art-house classic) isn't such a slam-dunk after all."

    Part of the problem, no secret here, is that many of the people running movie studios know far less about the cinema arts than they should. 

    With some notable exceptions, they're typically people without writing or filmmaking experience, relying instead on business, law or financial backgrounds. 

    Many are former studio publicity, promotion or sales functionaries who rose, often for reasons having little or nothing to do with the processes by which films are developed.

    Given the limitations of their experience they tend to be uncomfortable with unfamiliar concepts that have not been tested in the marketplace.

    Safer to bankroll "Santa Clause 4" or "Home Alone 5" than to risk money on something weird like "Driving Miss Daisy." Leave that to the Zanucks.

    So get ready for a remake of the 1961 Charlton Heston-Sophia Loren epic "El Cid," possibly starring Tom Cruise and Jennifer Connelly. But why?

    "The generation that goes to the movies," speculates "El Cid" producer Arthur Sarkissian, "I don't know if they want to rent the old movie and watch it.

    "There's [also] a vast amount of material" in studio vaults, he says.

    Indeed.

    "Alfie, " the 1966 movie that made Michael Caine a star, is being remade. Joel and Ethan Coen ("Barton Fink," "Fargo," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?") are prepping "an American spin" on the 1955 Peter Sellers comedy "The Ladykillers."

    Reported possibilities are "Flight of the Phoenix," "Fahrenheit 451," "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" and "Barbarella," with Drew Barrymore reprising Jane Fonda's 1968 role.

     Sounds more like a video weekend to me.

    "No matter how hard Hollywood tries to brainwash moviegoers into embracing familiarity," Goldstein concludes, "when we gather in the dark we crave something fresh and new."

    E-mail: [email protected]

Look. Up on the screen. As you passively watch that movie, Hollywood is sending a new message about the ultimate cinematic taboo: interracial romance. Decades after the industry first examined the tolerance for these unions in the 1967 film, ''Guess Who's Coming to Dinner,'' a melting pot of whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and Asians are hooking up on celluloid. 

In the past few weeks, multicultural couplings have played out in ''The Truth About Charlie'' and ''Welcome to Collinwood.'' They'll be seen starting Friday in ''Far From Heaven'' and next week in the James Bond film ''Die Another Day.'' Could it be that the days when Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington bid goodbye with a friendly hug in ''The Pelican Brief'' have disappeared?

''I think Hollywood wants to look like [it's] very in tune with what's going on in the world, and you know, the audience is getting younger and the audience is getting more multicultural,'' says Tanya Kersey-Henley, who does double duty as the editor in chief of the trade publication Black Talent News and as founder and executive director of the Hollywood Black Film Festival. ''Even if the audience were, say, all-white ... just the influence of African-American culture into white society has allowed us to be a little bit more accepting of these relationships.''

Making the transition easier is a new generation of actors - Washington, Jennifer Lopez, Halle Berry - that people don't particularly view as black or Latino. Helping the transformation along is the highly courted teen and 'tween audience that equally embraces a white Justin Timberlake, a biracial Vin Diesel, or an African-American Nelly. And it certainly doesn't hurt that television has served a multicultural stew of interracial dating on ''ER,'' ''Will & Grace,'' ''Ally McBeal,'' and ''The West Wing.'' 

Before you start celebrating Hollywood's newfound racial openness, be aware that there are limits to how the industry depicts these relationships. Those hungry sex scenes in last year's ''Monster's Ball'' between Berry and Billy Bob Thornton? ''That's still a stretch,'' says Kersey-Henley. Energetic kissing and postcoital scenes are about as far as most movies go. 

''These films are for all of America,'' explains Kersey-Henley, ''and there's still far too many areas in America that aren't ready to see that on screen. I'm sure these relationships probably infuriate some people as well.''

There's no denying the world has changed since 1997's ''Kiss the Girls,'' which caused a minor ruckus when Morgan Freeman and Ashley Judd failed to portray the love connection their characters did in the James Patterson novel. The decade began with a 1991 New York Times poll that found 44 percent of whites and 70 percent of blacks approved of interracial marriage. It ended with a 2000 poll by the paper showing 63 percent of whites and 79 percent of blacks supported the unions. What choice do people have? Thirty-five years after the Supreme Court overturned miscegenation laws, Census Bureau figures show interracial couples represent one out of every 20 marriages.

In pop-culture terms, those figures translate into watching a romance bloom between a white Midwestern girl and a black guy from the city in last year's ''Save the Last Dance.'' The teen audience that made the film a $91 million hit approved of the pairing so much it bestowed lead actors Julia Stiles and Sean Patrick Thomas with a cup of golden popcorn for best kiss at last year's MTV Movie Awards. Stiles and Thomas accepted the award by playing tongue hockey in front of a cheering crowd. 

It's teen movies that often show people of different racial or ethnic groups getting frisky. Think last year's boarding school remake of Othello, ''O,'' and the Latino/white romance ''Crazy/Beautiful.'' The big-budget exceptions - last year's ''Swordfish'' and 2000's ''Mission: Impossible 2'' - are films that bet their popularity on teenage appeal.

''One thing I think is great about teen movies is issues of class and race are right there on the surface,'' says David Schwartz, chief curator of film at the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York. ''For some reason, you don't see that as much with adult movies.''

Unless they're independent or low-budget films. The directors of those movies don't have studio heads whispering middle-of-the-road suggestions in their ears. That allowed Todd Haynes to offer a thoughtful contemplation on the subject in ''Far From Heaven,'' out this Friday. In it, Julianne Moore is a 1950s housewife who develops a crush on her black gardener (Dennis Haysbert). As the illicit relationship unfurls, attracting the same negative comments from characters as the ones heard in ''Save the Last Dance,'' Schwartz says the film makes audiences think, ''Maybe we haven't come so far as we think.''

The latest crop of movies - ''The Truth About Charlie,'' ''Die Another Day,'' and ''Welcome to Collinwood'' - tackle the subject by not tackling it at all. Thandie Newton 's Regina Lambert and Mark Wahlberg 's Joshua Peters share a wisp of a kiss in the trailer for '' Charlie,'' a remake of ''Charade.'' As the characters navigate the gritty streets of Paris to solve the murder of Lambert's husband, the pair lock lips frequently. Race is never an issue.

Nor do the many characters in ''Collinwood,'' a comedic heist film, comment about the two casual interracial pairings in their midst. Joe Russo, 31, who wrote and directed the film with his brother Anthony, explains, ''What we felt the charm would be is that the characters don't deal with what you typically expect to see.''

The story unfolds in a working-class Cleveland neighborhood teeming with Irish-, Italian-, Polish- and African-American characters. When Michelle (Gabrielle Union) meets Basil (Andrew Davoli), feelings shift from cold to hot in the space of minutes. A few scenes later, both are talking marriage - never mind that Michelle's brother, Leeon, has her engaged to a man in the suburbs. When he finds out about the relationship, says Russo, ''Leon is upset because Davoli's character has ruined the marriage of his sister to a wealthy man, not because he's white.''

To Warrington Hudlin, cofounder of the Black Filmmaker Foundation in New York, these uncommented on unions represent a step forward: ''When race is never referenced, then race is not an issue,'' he says.

But Lee Daniels, who produced last year's ''Monster's Ball,'' which landed Berry an Oscar, thinks this latest trend merely reflects Hollywood's reluctance to deal with reality. ''They don't hit you in the face with the ugliness of what interracial relationships bring,'' says Daniels. ''As long as it doesn't address the issues and the problems [of those unions], everybody seems to be cool with it.''

Hollywood also seems cool with it only if certain people slip into those roles. Since Wesley Snipes dealt with the issue point-blank in Spike Lee 's 1991 film, ''Jungle Fever,'' he has had a glimmer of a flirtation with Diane Lane in 1997's ''Murder at 1600,'' a French girlfriend in 1998's ''U.S. Marshals,'' and an Asian wife and white mistress in 1997's ''One Night Stand.'' Although Angela Bassett shares a voluptuous kiss with Ralph Fiennes at the end of 1995's ''Strange Days'' and played Robert De Niro's girlfriend in last year's ''The Score,'' it's Berry and Newton who have been the go-to actresses when it comes to black woman/white man pairings.

If Berry follows the traditional Bond girl trajectory, she'll share a bed with Pierce Brosnan in ''Die Another Day,'' opening Nov. 22. Newton has courted white men in 1995's ''Jefferson in Paris,'' 1998's ''Besieged,'' and 2000's ''Mission: Impossible 2.'' People in the business think it's no coincidence that both are light-skinned, biracial women.

''It's part of that whole psychological syndrome,'' says Kersey-Henley. ''A little drop of black is OK.''

Challenges to those perceptions may come in the next few years. Daniels has read some of the screenplays making the rounds in independent and studio circles. He says, ''A new breed of thinkers are coming up and saying, `Guess what, you all, this is something we've got to address.'' As Hollywood pokes deeper into the issue - there's a ''Guess Who's Coming to Dinner'' remake in the pipeline that may star Bernie Mac - it will have to figure out how authentically it wants to cast those parts.

''The question is,'' says Daniels, ''are they willing to put a Loretta Devine '' - the full-bodied, chocolate-colored actress featured in the television drama ''Boston Public'' - ''opposite Billy Bob Thornton? To me that's real. That's life.''

NEW YORK -- To have the director present while watching a film in which you are unsure of when to smile and when to be serious, could be either enlightening or anxiety-provoking.
But the audience need have no fear, at least at the Oct. 22 Gotham screening of Jonathan Demme's "The Truth About Charlie": The helmer understands.

"I swear to God, I told Universal we should put on the poster, 'When in doubt, laugh,' " Demme said. "They were like, 'I don't think so.'"

He explained his pull toward the pic's unorthodox, mismatched style, modeled on 1960s French New Wave films, partly as a rebellion.

"All of a sudden it was really liberating for (Demme and cinematographer Tak Fujimoto) to forget about all the rules and matching angles and just go out and have a blast and trust in the excitement that can come when you break the rules."

Along for the ride were cast members Tim Robbins and Thandie Newton, producer Neda Armian and guests Susan Sarandon, Holly Hunter, Natasha Richardson, Toni Morrison, Elisabeth Shue, David Blaine, Kimberley Peirce and Walter Mosley.

With The Truth About Charlie, big-hearted Jonathan Demme is up to his old playful pre-Oscar tricks. 

After all, it takes an audacious filmmaker to want to rework a stylish classic such as Charade. Especially one with supernovas Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. 

But then the director of Beloved, Philadelphia and The Silence of the Lambs is an incredible optimist. Who else would make an offbeat movie such as Melvin and Howard, about an ordinary guy and billionaire Howard Hughes, that gets glowing reviews and two Oscars? 

"The Truth About Charlie may be the offspring of Charade , but it's got a life of its own," he says. 

The thriller, about a young widow trying to recover her late husband's hidden fortune while being pursued by a trio of crooks, falls into his favorite one-liner for films: "Terrific woman in serious jeopardy surrounded by a bunch of men who want something from her." 

After watching the 1963 gripper in his office one night, he reached for the phone and called the head of Universal. 

"I said, "You own Charade. I'd love to remake it and do the same kind of fun-fun-fun thing but tell a somewhat different story, have a very different relationship and take a more diverse look at the cast of characters.'" 

The next morning he called Stanley Donen, who directed Charade, to get the master's blessing. "Very little thought and calculation went into this," Mr. Demme says. "I just seized on the notion and ran with it." 

More than anything else, he says, he saw a chance to put new mom Thandie Newton into a contemporary part. "When I worked with her on Beloved, I truly felt that this was as gifted an actress as I ever worked with." 

But until now, he says, she's mostly played outsider, historical or action parts. "And we don't have a clue what she's like. Don't you think she's enchanting? I was convinced she'd be adorable in a movie where she could play herself to a certain extent." 

As the woman searching for answers about husband Charlie's death and missing fortune, Ms. Newton displays beguiling decency and gumption in the film, which opened Friday. 

As for the 59-year-old Cary Grant role, the director says, he couldn't get any farther away from the suave British actor than young, edgy, street-smart American Mark Wahlberg. 

"He's a fish out of water. Here's Marky-Mark wearing a beret, spouting French, running all over Europe, smiling and being sweet, too sweet, falling in love, but when the leading lady kisses him, he backs off." 

What he didn't want to show, the director says, was a woman who found a man so irresistible that she excused whatever chicanery he seemed guilty of. "That was the tightrope act that Charade pulled off." 

Like the original, Mr. Demme's sometimes faithful, often radically different version is set in Paris. 

"That was really grueling. You know what the worst part was – having to go to those French restaurants at night after a hard day's work and eat those meals and drink that wine." 

But instead of the elegant High Style of the earlier film, he opted for a new grittier look with a New Wave visual perspective. It's the movie he'd have made right out of film school, he says. That is, if he'd gone to film school. 

"My sense of movies that are set in Paris is this gorgeous sunlight shining just right off all the monuments and amazing architecture. But the fact is that, certainly at the time of year we were shooting, it's almost always raining." 

Being able to capitalize on the time-honored, classical romantic images of Paris excited him, the director says. "But I know from my visits to Paris that there's a whole other smoldering casbah-ish side to Paris that we haven't seen in movies very much, and we're going to be able to expand moviegoers' sense of what it's like to experience the city." 

Besides, after making traditional films for more than a decade, the graduate of Roger Corman's quick-and-dirty school of filmmaking was ready to break the bonds of classical structure. 

"In Paris," he says, "the regulations are strange and liberating for filmmakers. If you don't set up a tripod, if you don't lay down dolly tracks, you don't need a permit to shoot in places." 

Also, he says, "You also don't have to get permission to have passer-bys' licenses used in the movie. If people wander in front of your camera, they're fair game." 

As a result, he says, "We were able to shoot with a lot more spontaneity and a lot less restrictions than I'm used to in America." 

It fascinates him that while Mr. Donen was filming Charade in the City of Light in December 1962-January 1963, New Wave directors Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Varda and Demy were cranking away around the corner. 

In keeping with Mr. Demme's Nouvelle Vague love affair, genre icons Anna Karina, Agnés Varda, Charles Aznavour and Magali Noël make appearances in Charlie. And there's a special nod to the French director he met and befriended while working for United Artists in 1968. 

"If you saw the cast and crew credits," he says, "we pan the camera over Truffaut's grave and you see a hand adjusting a ribbon that says 'Merci' on it." 

E-mail [email protected]