Juliette

The program listed the opera's premiere as taking place April 27, 1987, in Paris, and in some ways it seemed like a premiere when the Opera Company of Philadelphia staged Gounod's Romeo et Juliette Monday night at the Academy of Music. The curious error, however, was more symptomatic of the unsettled nature of this final production of the season, for the opera was a late-season choice (replacing the previously announced Mefistofele), and its casting had gone through even later substitutions.

What do we expect of singing lovers? Say, for instance, opera's Romeo and Juliet? Ardor, certainly. Sensitivity, hopefully. And phrasing to mirror the shyness and the ecstasy of adolescent pillow talk. When Gounod gave the young lovers four duets in his opera modeled after Shakespeare, the number was unprecedented. Four tenor-soprano duos is still a lot of love music, as listeners were reminded at the Opera Company of Philadelphia's production of Romeo et Juliette, which opened Friday at the Academy of Music.

This time last year, the Metropolitan Opera's foray into high-def simulcasts in movie theaters across the country was a quixotic experiment. Now, the second simulcast season, opening tomorrow with an all-star performance of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, feels like an institution - with Washington Opera, La Scala and no doubt others catching on to the idea. Despite reports of considerable technical glitches in venues (and some customer-care deficits in local theaters), tickets are sought heatedly in advance, and even one of the larger venues, Philadelphia's Riverview Cinema, was almost sold out days before tomorrow's Romeo.

In Who the Hell Is Juliette?, his freewheeling, defiantly unconventional hodgepodge of fact and fiction, Carlos Marcovich poses a tantalizing question and offers an answer that's both provocative and enigmatic. Moviegoers who enjoy seeing the rules broken will savor this entertaining oddity from the Argentine-born, Mexico-based filmmaker. In his examination of the lives of two real women, Marcovich doesn't so much blur the line between fact and fiction as ignore it completely. Juliette is a confused Havana teenager from a very broken home.

Hector Berlioz's Romeo et Juliette demanded a new adjective when it was written. Not an opera, or a musical adaptation, it has lived under the uncomfortably inexact term of dramatic symphony. Interpretation of the work has been almost as uncomfortably managed, for as soon as Berlioz had created a work for chorus, soloists and orchestra that suggested opera, he handed the dramatic force and characterization of the music to the orchestra. The work had not been a frequent choice for Philadelphia Orchestra concerts until Riccardo Muti revived it three seasons ago. Then, with time to absorb its possibilities still further - and to add an important voice for Juliet - the music director brought it back this week for concerts at the Academy of Music.

We hope we are on the road to Juliette, Ga. We have starved ourselves since last night, and we're set to dine on some good old fried green tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. You'd think there would be tons of signs - "This Exit!" "Don't Miss It!" "Made Famous by the Movie!" Nothing. We had better not be disappointed. Surely that woman in Macon wasn't pulling our leg? She was the one who told us this was the road to Juliette, the tiny town deep in the heart of Dixie that played host to stars and crews filming the hit movie Fried Green Tomatoes.

Coline Serreau, the French writer-director of Romuald and Juliette, has yet to release her first English-language film, but already she's had a big impact on moviegoing in America. The hit Three Men and a Baby was adapted from her 1985 comedy Trois Hommes et un Couffin (Three Men and a Cradle), and it in turn spawned this season's insipid sequel, Three Men and a Little Lady. Both the Americanization and its spinoff came from Disney's Touchstone imprimatur. Now Disney's Hollywood Pictures is retooling Romuald and Juliette (given a limited release this spring under the unwieldy title Mama, There's a Man in Your Bed)

Though the title of People's Light and Theatre's I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda is unwieldy, Sonja Linden's 2003 work is compact. Written for two people, a white man and black woman, the play straddles three countries, a genocide, and 100 years of history by focusing - to its detriment - mostly on the present. Juliette (Miriam Hyman) is a Tutsi survivor of the genocide perpetrated by her Hutu neighbors, while Briton Simon (David Ingram)

In I've Loved You So Long, Kristin Scott Thomas gives a performance that is so chilling, so braced in pain that it's almost impossible to bear. Almost impossible, because, in fact, it's impossible not to behold this riveting piece of role immersion in a story that's sad, stark and redemptive. Written and directed by French novelist Philippe Claudel, I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime) offers up the portrait of Juliette (Scott Thomas), a middle-aged woman returning into society after a long stretch in prison.

Slick entertainment is rarely as, yes, slickly entertaining as it is in "Heartbreaker," a French romantic farce that is commercial cinema at its most successful. Given that Hollywood has all but forgotten how to turn out adult amusements of this type, it's especially welcome. A major box-office hit in France, "Heartbreaker" took a certain risk in featuring two major dramatic stars, Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis, who'd never done romantic comedy before. You'd never know that from what's on screen, however, as both performers throw themselves into the parts with enthusiasm and panache.

Though the story of Romeo and Juliet never goes out of fashion, the question posed by the Opera Company of Philadelphia is this: Can it be about fashion? And on a less-than-Armani budget? Skepticism abounds in advance of Friday's opening of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, which turns the Montagues and Capulets from families into rival fashion houses, spraying paint over each other's posters while vying for market domination. Surely the opera company's executives, Robert B. Driver and David Devan, are fielding plenty of "star-crossed runways" wisecracks.

Slick entertainment is rarely as, yes, slickly entertaining as it is in "Heartbreaker," a French romantic farce that is commercial cinema at its most successful. Given that Hollywood has all but forgotten how to turn out adult amusements of this type, it's especially welcome. A major box-office hit in France, "Heartbreaker" took a certain risk in featuring two major dramatic stars, Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis, who'd never done romantic comedy before. You'd never know that from what's on screen, however, as both performers throw themselves into the parts with enthusiasm and panache.

Bittersweet and achingly beautiful, Cairo Time is about a woman and a man who spend a few days together in a teeming city and find themselves, maybe, falling in love - an affair that's never consummated, or even acknowledged, except for the halting, yearning look in their eyes. In another place, another time, perhaps . . . or perhaps not. But a connection has been made, one that won't slip away. Written and directed by the Syrian-Canadian filmmaker Ruba Nadda, Cairo Time moves unhurriedly through the arcades and boulevards of the clamorous Egyptian capital, where a magazine editor from New York, Juliette (Patricia Clarkson)

In I've Loved You So Long, Kristin Scott Thomas gives a performance that is so chilling, so braced in pain that it's almost impossible to bear. Almost impossible, because, in fact, it's impossible not to behold this riveting piece of role immersion in a story that's sad, stark and redemptive. Written and directed by French novelist Philippe Claudel, I've Loved You So Long (Il y a longtemps que je t'aime) offers up the portrait of Juliette (Scott Thomas), a middle-aged woman returning into society after a long stretch in prison.

Though the title of People's Light and Theatre's I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given to Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda is unwieldy, Sonja Linden's 2003 work is compact. Written for two people, a white man and black woman, the play straddles three countries, a genocide, and 100 years of history by focusing - to its detriment - mostly on the present. Juliette (Miriam Hyman) is a Tutsi survivor of the genocide perpetrated by her Hutu neighbors, while Briton Simon (David Ingram)

Juliette Binoche, introducing Flight of the Red Balloon to audiences at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, described the project as a "life-changing experience. " A tad dramatic maybe, but hey, she's an actress. The next day, as she prepared to introduce another of her movies at the festival - Amos Gitai's Disengagement - Binoche elaborated. "I had never experienced such complete trust from a director," she said, referring to Hou Hsiao Hsien, the Taiwanese filmmaker who took the 1956 children's cinema classic "The Red Balloon" and, well, flew with it in his improvisational, slice-of-Parisian-life homage.

This time last year, the Metropolitan Opera's foray into high-def simulcasts in movie theaters across the country was a quixotic experiment. Now, the second simulcast season, opening tomorrow with an all-star performance of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, feels like an institution - with Washington Opera, La Scala and no doubt others catching on to the idea. Despite reports of considerable technical glitches in venues (and some customer-care deficits in local theaters), tickets are sought heatedly in advance, and even one of the larger venues, Philadelphia's Riverview Cinema, was almost sold out days before tomorrow's Romeo.

Watching film stars rawk out is often like viewing a nine-car pileup. You know you're in for twisted faces, flailing arms, and the ungodly hollers of pained voices. But you can't look away while you scratch your head, wondering how Russell Crowe and Gina Gershon got out alive. So, you'd be foolish not to be leery of Juliette Lewis, who brought Juliette and the Licks to a Five Spot that, sadly, was half-filled on Wednesday. We say sadly because Lewis - the unconventionally sexy actress who was an innocent in Cape Fear and a serial murderer in Natural Born Killers - accomplished something rare for an actor-turned-rocker: She used her cinematic personality to fuel music as dynamic and weird as she is onscreen.

CHARLES GOUNOD: "ROMEO ET JULIETTE. " 5:30 p.m. Sunday, WHYY-TV (Channel 12). Call this one "R&J Lite," a boiled-down version for opera nibblers. This film version of Charles Gounod's opera stars the wildly acclaimed husband-and-wife team of tenor Roberto Alagna and soprano Angela Gheorghiu as the ill-fated teen-age lovers in "Romeo et Juliette," though their 180-minute complete CD version has been shortened to 73 minutes. That means director Barbara Willis Sweete (who did last year's "Don Giovanni Unmasked")