Minnie Driver plays the strong-willed Rosina/Mary, and it's her fullest performance since she burst onto the scene a few years ago in Circle of Friends. Before her arrival at the Isle of Skye, she's fascinated with London's prostitutes and their worldly attitude toward sex. Pretending to be a Christian triggers the latent actress in Rosina, and she finds it ever easier to indulge her baser fascinations.

She's helped in this regard by the master of the house, a dilettante scientist who's trying to perfect the development process for photography. Tom Wilkinson plays Master Cavendish, who plans to use this nascent art to catalog the wonders of nature. But Rosina is captivated by the potential of photography to create illusions, and between her tutoring sessions with the Cavendishes' daughter, she helps out in the lab and encourages Master Cavendish to detail human beauty. Her recreation of Salome turns out to be too much for him, and he quickly goes from snapping her picture to undoing her stays.

Judging by The Governess, writer-director Sandra Goldbacher has been studying Jane Campion's films. She employs the same unusual color schemes--at once pale and supersaturated--and she betrays the same affection for flat landscapes where the sky mingles playfully with the earth. Most of all, she's attracted to the dreamlike possibilities of her narrative, as she takes a fairly straightforward story and lingers on scenes so long that one forgets there's a story going on at all.

That fitfulness is The Governess's one real failing--it's a useless affectation. There's a spaciness to the film, as though Goldbacher filmed a three-hour movie and then cut out every other scene. There are subplots in The Governess about the Cavendishes' drug-addled elder son, about the vacuous Mistress Cavendish, and about a London cholera epidemic, but these never amount to anything, either thematically or structurally.

What lingers about The Governess, though, is Minnie Driver's gradual immersion into self-deception, which leads her into despair when she realizes (as she must have always known) that she and Master Cavendish can never really be a couple. She knows what they've been doing is inappropriate, but since her pretense has been so successful so long, why couldn't the two of them just keep on pretending? She starts out pretending to be Salome, and soon she learns what the London prostitutes already know.