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Arts & Entertainment Preview - November 1998 B Y   E L L A   T A Y L O R Dirty Laundry Dry Cleaning French director Anne Fontaine's marvelously unsettling new film, Dry Cleaning, begins with a sequined dress in need of laundering and ends with a heap of domestic trouble. In between is a compelling story of the pleasures and dangers of sexual awakening in the most ordinary of marriages. In cinematic terms the premise is familiar enough: a loving, conventional union is turned upside down by the intrusion of a renegade third party with more on his mind than friendship. Provincial dry cleaners Jean-Marie Kunstler (Charles Berling, last seen in Ridicule) and his wife, Nicole (Miou-Miou), wake up to the drab austerity of their hardworking days when they meet a brother-and-sister act of transvestite nightclub performers. The duo splits up, and when the fragile brother, Loïc (played with astonishing assurance by Stanislas Merhar, a nonprofessional picked up from the street), as ravenous for family as he is for sexual completion, joins the Kunstler household, he sets up an increasingly charged climate of sensual arousal. Fontaine (whose first film, Augustin, also plumbed the strangeness of the mundane) is masterly in her fluid control of the movie's rhythms, which set off the messy eroticism of the trio's night life against Jean-Marie's obsessive daytime striving for perfect cleanliness. Fontaine has a wily way with the telling detail: Jean-Marie hides behind his prissy moustache and obsession with stains, while a flicker of Nicole's soulful eyes discreetly flags her lust for life -- suggesting that all that we think we are can be confounded by a small shift of chance or (if you're a believer) fate. Strength in Numbers The Mighty In The Mighty, British director Peter Chelsom's deft interpretation of a best-selling novel for young adults by Rodman Philbrick, two marginalized Cincinnati boys -- one all brawn, the other all brain -- join forces against the schoolyard bullies who would make their lives miserable, and end up creating a knighthood of one. Inspired by the legends of King Arthur, the frail, handicapped wiseacre Kevin Dillon (played with breezy élan by Kieran Culkin) sits atop the shoulders of his stolid giant of a friend, Max Kane (Elden Henson, in a performance as quick-witted as his frame is bulky), and directs operations as the two outmaneuver the neighborhood thugocracy and ride to the rescue of the weak and downtrodden. The movie is enhanced by Charles Leavitt's lively screenplay and John de Borman's wonderfully inventive cinematography, which underscores the links between the dark terrors of the inner city and those of Arthurian legend. Imaginatively cast against type, Sharon Stone delivers a generously self-effacing performance as Kevin's careworn single mother, while Gillian Anderson, star of The X-Files, is delightful as the brassy lost soul who comes to the boys' rescue in their hour of need. Directed by Chelsom (whose short, distinguished track record includes Hear My Song and the under-appreciated Funny Bones) with an imaginative passion that's refreshingly free of the sentimentality that often accompanies material of this kind, The Mighty is at once a funny, moving testament to the power of friendship and literature, and a boy's own adventure story with broad adult appeal. Stepping Lively The Mundy sisters Adapted by Pat O'Connor (Circle of Friends) and screenwriter Frank McGuinness from Brian Friel's extraordinary stage play, Dancing at Lughnasa tells the story of the gradual unraveling of an Irish matriarchy during the glorious summer of '36. It's not only rumors of war that ruffle the relatively calm lives of the five Mundy sisters in their home town of Ballybeg, Donegal. Eking out a meager living and caring for Michael (Darrell Johnston), the adored love child of their rebellious youngest sister, Christina (decorative Catherine McCormack), the women -- Strolling in Ballybeg prissy Kate (Meryl Streep, flawless accent to the fore), plainspoken, fun-loving Maggie (played by Kathy Burke, an Absolutely Fabulous regular also much honored for her stunning performance in Gary Oldman's Nil by Mouth), quiet Agnes (Brid Brennan), and simple-minded Rose (brilliantly played by Sophie Thompson, younger sister of Emma) -- nurse the secret dreams and fears that will erupt with the arrival of the two men in their lives. Their brother, Jack (portrayed by Michael Gambon with the innocent sagacity of an elderly infant), a priest who left riding high on an overseas mission, returns now in disgrace, a destroyed man with only his love of Africa to sustain him. Michael's feckless, charming father, Gerry (Rhys Ifans), on his way to fight -- he barely knows why -- for Franco in Spain, drops in for a flying visit that gooses the sexuality of more than one sister. Gorgeously, if sentimentally, shot by Kenneth MacMillan, Dancing at Lughnasa chronicles with sensitively muted foreboding the forces that crowd in to threaten the solidarity of this fractious yet umbilically close family. Ella Taylor is a film critic for LA Weekly. Go to ... Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.