When Night is Falling Details

A companion piece to I've Heard the Mermaids Singing, this is a less obviously comic and far more sensual study of lesbian awakening from Patricia Rozema. From its contrived beginning, the romance follows along overly familiar lines, in spite of a soaringly seductive hang-gliding sequence. But the performances of tempestuous circus artist Rachael Crawford and prissy Protestant academic Pascale Bussières give it a sensitivity and truth to match its rising passion. Henry Czerny is also impressive as Bussières's colleague and confused lover, whose response to his cuckolding provides this dreamily photographed but gushingly scripted and symbolically clumsy film's one significant surprise.

Good-looking, intense, serious drama of sexual confusions that founders on overwrought dialogue and its failure to explore the issues of morality and individual choice it raises; its attempt at magic realism, reinterpreting the myth of Cupid and Psyche, i