Michael Apted is admired for work with his documentaries like the "Up" series, and for smart art-house pictures like "Enigma," but he's also willing to try his hand at more commercial formulas, such as the Bond picture, "The World Is Not Enough" or this fable-cum-thriller by Nicholas Kazan. Jennifer Lopez, charming in all the phases of happiness and fear she's asked to enact, plays Slim, a diner waitress who meats Mitch, a handsome, wealthy, charming man (Bill Campbell), who, since he seems too good to be to be true, will at some point, say five years into the marriage with a 4-year-old daughter, turn out to be a lying snake.

Statistically, familial abusers seldom can admit to their violations. "It's a horrific problem, isn't it, abuse?" Apted asks in his laconic English accent. "All these red-button issues, whether it's Anita Hill and sexual abuse in the workplace, or O. J. Simpson or the Catholic Church right now. Everywhere we go, we uncover endless abuse. I believe in the cycle of abuse. If children are abused, they will [grow up to be] abusive."

Apted doesn't mind working with formulas, and in fact, sought out this job based on the script. "My agenda, really, was to try and to get those two characters in the room where the audience would be happy to see it play out," he says. "What I wanted is for Slim, when you knew it was the last chance, she'd gone through everything, every possible recourse to try and get some equilibrium, some sanity in her life, and she couldn't. This man wanted to kill her. You couldn't turn round to me, I mean, an audience wouldn't say, 'Why didn't she go to the cops, why hasn't she got any money?' or blah-blah-blah. That was my agenda. It is kind of, dare I say it, larger than life, Shakespearean?" He smiles at this scrap of hubris, continuing, "There's no sense of this being a panacea for marital troubles--getting hold of a gun and shooting your husband or wife. I felt it would work in terms of giving the audience the satisfaction of the third act, if they were comfortable that both the characters were there and that was the only place they could be. All the build-up from both characters leads us to that moment."

The movie starts quickly. Years pass. Intertitles prompt us along. "That was a bit problematic. They were in the script. I thought, 'All right.' Then I shot the film, shot the titles, put it together, saw it, just hated the titles. I said, 'This is ridiculous! You don't need these. Get this out!' But when I started showing the film, people were baffled. The script has very fast movement in time but in very slow scenes. So the scenes are long, but the time jumps are very large. It wasn't a montage, 'Oh, I see, we're going to do Slim or Billy's romance in stills and flashes and all that in fifteen seconds, we'll get to it.' It wasn't that at all. The first ten minutes of the film covers five years and the last ten minutes covers ten minutes. There's an enormous, complicated amount of time issues. The audience wondered if it was a dream! I put the titles back in, and although some people didn't like the titles, no one was confused, no one was saying, 'What is going on? Where are we now?' So I went 180 degrees on it. It was the lesser of two evils. I'd rather some people moan but [most] people wouldn't be confused."

The opening plays out in romantic comedy idiom. Our expectations are subverted, just as her hopes for her marriage and family are. "Yeah, everything," Apted says. "Color, the way it's shot, the typeface for the titles. Early on, someone said, I don't like the titles, they're like a comedy.' I said, 'That's exactly the point!'"

"Enough" becomes a woman-in-peril heart-pounding melodrama, and it could have been one of the pro forma pictures Paramount puts out, like "Double Jeopardy." What was Apted's greatest concern? "Casting. The importance of how I cast Mitch was crucial, obviously, that he would appear to be nice and sweet. Not only did I have to be sure the script was nice and sweet, I had to have an actor who was as well. But even more fundamental, I had to have an actor who didn't bring any baggage, of being a roustabout or having done a bunch of action movies or who has played tough guys and villains. Supposing Russell Crowe had played him, the audience would say, 'She shouldn't be marrying him! Of course he's going to turn out to be a rough guy!' If you're going to have this conceit of a romantic comedy in a sense turning into a nightmare, audiences are so way ahead of you, you've got to cover your ass so much."

Despite the revenge turn, Lopez's appeal to men could make "Enough" into a film their date can sucker them into seeing. "But no guy's gonna want to go see a guy's ass being kicked!" Apted says, laughing. "I don't know. I don't know how that's gonna shake out. They're opening it at a time when there's not much out there for women. We're all going to be swamped by 'Star Wars.' Whether this picture is going to appeal to young men at all, it will appeal to young women and maybe older women and maybe if it's successful, it could cross over and be a date movie, but I don't know... "

While watching it, we're on her side, not Billy's. He's not a guy, he's an asshole. "Absolutely," Apted says. "That's exactly right. Still, I don't quite how it sits as a date movie!" He barks another laugh.

"Enough" opens May 24.

Also by Ray Pride

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