As the carefully constructed, emotions-laid-bare chronicle of failing marriages, We Don't Live Here Anymore is one of those difficult but worthy films seldom seen in summer.

Call it alternate programming. It's an adult selection at a time when tasteless movies such as Without A Paddle cater to teens. It's beautifully, optimistically depressing.

That may sound contradictory, but the interplay works in the same way that it did for some of Swedish master Ingmar Bergman's revolutionary portraits of fractured relationships. Even today, if you watch Scenes From A Marriage, you can either run screaming from the room or learn valuable lessons from the unsentimental, uncompromising insights into human behaviour under stress.

So it is in American-born, Australian-trained filmmaker John Curran's We Don't Live Here Anymore. The optimism built into the piece emerges from our hope that the characters live emotionally enriched lives later, after The End.

The film is based on two short stories by the late Andre Dubus (father of novelist Andre Dubus III, author of House Of Sand And Fog, itself a brilliant downer). The inter-related short stories, each with a different character point-of-view, were blended skillfully into a cohesive script by Larry Gross, whose contributions are as significant as Curran's.

We Don't Live Here Anymore was then brilliantly cast and marvellously played by a name ensemble, none of whom is fussed about looking wretched or being flawed when the occasion calls for it.

Laura Dern and Mark Ruffalo play one couple; Naomi Watts and Peter Krause play the other, the first couple's best friends. Both men are writer-teachers at a local college in New England (the movie, while set in the eastern U.S., was shot on location in Vancouver). Both couples have children.

Neither marriage is functioning well, although the principals put on a show when hanging out at dinner together. We quickly learn, however, that Ruffalo and Watts are escalating their flirtations into a full-blown sexual affair.

So their lies escalate, too. Ruffalo is particularly impassioned about blustering his way through when Dern questions his fidelity. In cruel fashion, he turns his guilt on her, nailing her for being a lousy housewife and mother. The hostility reaches a fever pitch in sync with the intensity of the affair. There will be other complications, too, as Dern and Krause react to their spouses' moody behaviour.

The film is adept at assessing the benefits of adultery -- brief bursts of self-confidence and sexual satisfaction -- and then measuring them against the bitter, sometimes brutish costs of the affair. The selflessness of the actors in bringing that message home is admirable, even courageous.

Watts, in particular, is intriguing because she also served as a producer, ensuring the project could be made. Yet she yielded the best, most complex, most rewarding role to Dern. That wipes away fears that Watts, on the verge of Hollywood superstardom, will be selling out any day soon. Enabling something as good, as challenging and as powerful as We Don't Live Here Anymore is a wonderful gesture.

(This film is rated 14-A)

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