Gloomy Sunday

The film is high romance, rather like those American movies of the 1940s -- people snatching at happiness in a world aflame. We don't make them anymore -- stupid us --but we ought to be glad someone does.

The fine cast, the elegant settings and the swoony title song somehow draw you in.

It's possible that Gloomy Sunday is more "significant" than it is compelling.

Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.

Who knew that one of Billie Holiday's most haunting songs was written in Budapest in the 1930s? I didn't until I saw Gloomy Sunday, a German film, shot in Hungary and directed by Rolf Schubel, that I enjoyed quite a lot, even though it's all over the map in more ways than one.

It's a piquant story but unfortunately the movie creaks with European-style artifice. It tells its story in a rather cinematically stilted style, and some of the dramatic moments come perilously close to unintentional parody.

Dissolving four characters' lives into the dank smoke of the bitterest of torch songs, Gloomy Sunday fashions an apocryphal, pretty, and somewhat pat biography of the title ballad.