'A Handful of Dust' (PG)

If there were Olympics for neurotics, the Brits would take the gold medal in self-reproach. No other nation spends more time satirizing, criticizing and apologizing for its class system, sexual hypocrisy and snotty accents. Clearly this is a culture in need of an action hero. They could call him Tally-Ho.

"A Handful of Dust," from Evelyn Waugh's novel, is the latest in devastating condemnations of polite society, a lemon-sour period piece directed by Charles Sturridge, who also adapted Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited." That was a lovely bit of nostalgia, but "A Handful of Dust" is a bitter and finally black portrait of a marriage based on Waugh's own, which ended when his wife ran off with an Etonian.

Sturridge's well-dressed adaptation reflects the author's disillusionment all too well. It is gentleman's invective, ironic, amused, above it all -- anguish under varnish. Sophistication can be so exhausting. In fact, the characters' detachment is more disquieting than a wake. In this snob's stratosphere, sorrow brings no tears and all the laughs are knowing. "Mumsies," "veddy veddies" and "jolly goods" punctuate the brittle, dispassionate yet tragic encounters.

The setting is the ghastly Gothic estate of Lord Tony Last (James Wilby), who spends every pence to keep the past intact. Though house poor, he, Lady Brenda (Kristin Scott Thomas) and son John Andrew (Jackson Kyle) are happy in a British way, having hunts and occasional weekend parties. Lord Tony's idyllic marriage to Lady Brenda is threatened when she is attracted to hanger-on John Beaver (Rupert Graves). "No one likes you except me, dahling," says Lady Brenda to Beaver, who beds her inevitably.

Telling her husband that she has decided to study economics in London, the attractive matron takes a "flat suitable for base love," where she trysts with Beaver. Loyal Lord Tony, the only sympathetic character, putters in the country while his wife plays in town. Poor numb Lord Tony turns out to be a schnook in jodhpurs. But then anybody dim enough to believe that economics story deserves what he gets.

Lady Brenda goes away for the weekend even after her only son is killed in a hunt. Now that's cold. But she pays as little attention to life's traumas as a firewalker to hot coals. Beaver is likewise well equipped for life as a gigolo, with a tuxedo and the ability to have sweatless sex. "Handful of Dust" has no illusions. That is the point, well acted and well taken. How rueful.

The movie loses its sense of place and structure when Lord Tony, betrayed and depressed, goes adventuring in South America with an eccentric explorer. Naturally, it turns out rather badly when the lord is captured by savages. This coda to the central story was derived from Waugh's short story "The Man Who Loved Dickens," which was adapted for the closing chapters of "A Handful of Dust." It's an ending out of context, a luxuriant and steamy thicket of clinging vines. For Lord Tony, that pure but apparently inbred fellow, it is only a jungle of another kind.

A Handful of Dust, at the K-B Paris, is rated PG.