tainted love; A shuffle of spouses and a slew of socialites spark heady passions.

Byline: Sarah Kerr

Her prettiness suggests innocence; her manner is demure. But Naomi Watts excels at portraying women who are on intimate terms with their libidos. When we first see her in We Don't Live Here Anymore, playing the quiet young wife Edith, she's tipsy from an evening spent drinking with her fiction-writer husband, Hank (Peter Krause), and the married couple who are their closest friends (the foursome live in a bucolic New England town where there's not much to do but throw wine-soaked dinner parties). She nods at Hank with a familiar, wifely smile. But it's Jack (Mark Ruffalo), a brooding literature instructor, who's the recipient of her take-me-now gaze. And Jack, who hardly seems to notice his own wife, Terry (Laura Dern, tall and skinny as a blonde Olive Oyl), shoots Edith back a look that meets her lust and raises it.

So begins a summer of extramarital trysts-in a motel, down by the river under the midday sun-and venomous spousal spats. Directed with an elegant eye by John Curran, this relatively star-studded indie melodrama was adapted by Larry Gross from two stories by Andre Dubus, whose gloomy fiction from the New Yorker also supplied the basis, a few years ago, for the acclaimed In the Bedroom. Gross's screenplay explores how hard it can be for an individual to grasp the big picture of his or her life-the long-term upward and downward trends. Terry can't figure out what's happening to her marriage; guilty Jack knows all too well, but his feelings about his betrayal remain a mystery, even to himself. There's a time-

capsule quality to their problems: if it weren't for the cordless phones and laptops, you'd be forgiven for thinking the film was set back in the seventies, when Dubus wrote these stories, and sexual freedom and the threat of divorce ...