TEEN LOVERS ON THE RUN IN ‘FIRE WITH FIRE’

In “Fire With Fire” (Mann’s Chinese and Plaza), the British Columbian hills (posing as the hills of Oregon) look cold and immaculate. Sloping down in crisp leaf-fallen grandeur, speared with trees, slashed by rocky cliffs that plunge toward white-whipped rivers, they have the chilly perfection of a showcase ad layout.

Director Duncan Gibbins and cinematographer Hiro Narita knock your eyes out with this scenery--and when they move inside, they give the interiors the same cool radiance. A convent school glows with burnished browns; even a delinquent honor camp looks ready for a Sports Illustrated feature. Watching this ,you wonder how studio cinematography could get any better. Then you follow the story, and you wonder how a script could get any emptier.

It’s not a bad film. Since it’s Gibbins’ first feature, it’s even something of a minor triumph for him. But it’s a disappointing one. Holes gape at you--and, at the end, it blows up in your face, like a water balloon hitting the street. It’s as if vacuous stories had become de rigueur ; as if the art of film now consists of taking dumb scripts and trying to make them work.

“Fire With Fire” is a Romeo-and-Juliet story, based by four scenarists on a New West article about a Pasadena convent school dance for some probation camp boys. Somehow this simple, promising subject has gotten impossibly inflated. The star-crossed couple don’t just meet; they hold a midnight sexual tryst in a crypt (with Zeffirelli-style candles). They don’t just spark adult disapproval; the camp head tries to kill the boy, and a nun tries to crash the gate on them as they escape. The lovers finally wind up in a Waldenesque cabin in the wilds, where love is pure, the wind rapturous and the sound Dolby. When the helicopters start arriving, you know the screenwriters have really popped their cork.

It’s a shame. In the most visible aspects of Gibbins’ direction--composition, detail, rhythm, the performances of the actors (especially Virginia Madsen and Craig Sheffer as the lovers, but also Kate Reid, Jon Polito, Jeffrey Jay Cohen and the others)--he’s done a superior job. Gibbins comes from BBC documentaries and rock videos (Glenn Frey’s “Smugglers Blues”) and, once again, he gives the lie to the easy cliche that MTV is ruining the movies.

If video alumnus Julien Temple, in “Absolute Beginners,” shows some real genius, Gibbins shows real sensitivity, flare-ups of inspiration. But the story is just too simple and symbol-ridden. It’s another case of structure without texture: everything blown up into billboard shots. This is another bloated movie with mostly subverbal communication, and some of the lines are so bad, the communication has to be subverbal.

“Fire With Fire” (MPAA-rated: PG 13) is good anyway--largely because director, actors and cinematographer wring so much out of it; because Madsen and Sheffer occasionally create such a lovely combustion. It has a thin but affecting lyricism and passion, though the effect is often like watching fine cologne squirted into a gleaming catsup bottle. You wince even as it fascinates you.