‘Overseas’ (NR)

Brigitte Rouan's "Overseas" is intelligent and acutely observed, and, yet curiously uninvolving. The film, set in Algeria during French colonial rule just after WWII, tells the story of three sisters: Zon (Nicole Garcia), Malene (Rouan) and Gritte (Marianne Basler). Rouan's method is to cover the same temporal ground three times, making each character the focal point of her own segment with the action seen from her particular angle. You could call it "Rashomon a la Francaise."

If the story itself were as vivid as Rouan had hoped, this approach might have worked. But before we've managed to work through it once, our interest is already fatigued. By the end of the second segment, you become an impatient timekeeper: two down, one to go.

The problem with this method of narrative recapitulation is that it reinforces Rouan's already detached style. Even in the first section, which focuses on Zon, the elder sister, we feel distant from the characters. Though Rouan gives us telling bits of information about this contradictory woman, we can never get a handle on her. Married to a naval officer (Philippe Galland) who comes ashore, it seems, only to get her pregnant, she appears, in some scenes, almost recklessly romantic, leaving her children right in the middle of their bath in order to make love to her husband. On other occasions, though, she's stern and exacting, poking her daughter in the leg with a sewing needle when she gets her Bible lesson wrong, and pulling out what looks like a cat-o'-nine-tails to administer discipline.

Malene, the frustrated middle sister, is saddled with a slothful husband (Yann Dedet) who barely has enough energy to turn the pages of his book, much less run the winery and take care of the kids. While Gritte, the youngest, takes a perverse kind of pleasure in constantly vacillating over whether to accept the marriage proposals from a handsome young diplomat.

With each successive telling, the story becomes more muddled. The political background, too, is sketchy, as if we were meant to know the historical facts of that time and place without being told. We're not sure how these personal events and the broader, social background are connected, or what Rouan is trying to make of their relation to one another. The whole affair, it turns out, is rather baffling.