The Governess<> Meet Minnie Driver, new and improved. She's playing multiple parts now, on and offscreen. She's a movie star, filmmaker, curvaceous babe, intellectual diva. See her featured in the Sunday New York Times<>, wearing Victorian period costume and discussing Two Drivers, the film production company she's started with her sister, Kate. Then see her on the cover of Cosmopolitan<>'s Sex Issue (apparently there's a difference between this and other issues), glammed out with hair blowing like a cosmo-girl's "mane,'' slammed into a shiny red dress with plunging-to-her-navel cleavage. See her also starring in The Governess<>, the thoughtful first feature by documentary-maker Sandra Goldbacher. In this film Driver's playing Rosina Da Silva, a young Jewish woman in 1840s London, forced by her father's murder to take a job to support her mother and sister. Posing as a gentile named (almost too cleverly) Mary Blackchurch, Rosina takes a position as a governess for the Cavendishes, a wealthy family in Scotland. Fiercely independent but trying very hard to behave herself for the sake of her family, Rosina eventually falls into a fervid affair with Charles Cavendish (Tom Wilkinson), the usually distracted head of the household. The affair begins when Rosina insinuates herself into Charles' work as a proto-photographer, first as assistant, and then as co-creator. Rosina and Charles find themselves fairly beguiled, less with each other than their shared passion for the process and the possibilities, the science and the art of photography. By turns hotheaded and calculating, Rosina is fun to watch, sort of a working class, Jewish, pragmatic version of Emma, with some backbone. She's also more philosophical, sophisticated, and careful than Charles, who can't decide whether he's going to be a rigid perfectionist or puerile cad. But she's a girl of her times too, and rather in love with being in love, believing that her and Charles' work-related triumphs (being recognized by some stuffy British scientific organization, for instance) will translate into a future, commitment, and equal partnership. Rosina's willfulness is matched not so much by her lover's tedious passive-aggressiveness as it is by the cunning of his perpetually indignant wife (Harriet Walter). Though she's not on screen nearly enough, Mrs. Cavendish is a crackly character; she's learned to make the most of the isolation imposed on her by Mr. C's sense of self-importance, verbally reducing his work to "Charles' botany' (before Rosina, he's mostly been making images of dead leaves, sign of his still heart). While their mansion is gorgeously appointed, set off by beaches and cliffs, living there has unmistakably made wannabe-urban sophisticate Mrs. Cavendish more than a little bitter. She tends to peer up from under her banana curls and lace caps just long enough to acknowledge Rosina or another servant, or dote on her pale children from across the room). She leaves it to Rosina to deal with the kids, the spoiled Clementina (Florence Hoath) and the romantic poet lookalike and university student Henry (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Rosina handles most situations with an acid wit. Because of her intensity, Rosina is a suitable role for Minnie Driver at this turning point in her career. Not so ago (can it only be three years?), she was a promising young actor, obviously talented and atypically beautiful. At first it seemd that industry folks were having a hard time fitting her into a category, which means that she was cast as The Girlfriend in a string of movies -- Circle of Friends<> (1995), Sleepers<> (1996), Big Night<> (1996), Hard Rain<> (1996), Grosse Point Blank<> (1997), and Good Will Hunting<> (1997). Not to mention offscreen, where she was the costar in a relationship with Matt Damon. The publicity attending these roles was largely favorable, though rumors made the breakup with Damon sound pretty awful. (Obligatory gossip update: Driver is currently hanging with Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, Damon with Winona Ryder, and his bestest buddy Ben Affleck with Gwyneth Paltrow: it is so<> hard to keep up.) Having survived such ghastly times, Driver is apparently making herself over. Her interviews for the Times<> and Cosmo<> both emphasize her wit, erudition, and down-to-earth sensibility. Contemplating the The Governess<> as period piece, and so, a departure for her, Driver offers that she agreed to do such a thing because the project wasn't too "chocolate-boxy.'' And while Rosina's strong will might seem idealistic (she errs on the side of too much passion and self-display, but all her choices are morally sound), the film actually spends less time on its characters' ethical tumults than on the exquisiteness of their search for the truth and precision promised by photography. It's this unsettling mix that keeps The Governess<> from turning into routine Victorian gothic (if there is such a thing) or straight-up melodrama. That and its attention to period details concerning Sephardic Judaism, anti-Semitism, sexism, educational canons, and marriage contracts: the movie has its agendas laid out, but it handles them deftly. Updating nineteenth-century narratives for twentieth-century audiences can be dicey. (Recent versions of Jane Eyre<> are good examples: the demure governess falling for her clearly psychotic, old-enough-to-be-her-father employer is a weary tale by now.) That Goldbacher wrote Rosina's story herself probably helps to disguise its revisionism. She's not tussling with revered works of art, but with well-known conventions, like women are happiest when ending up in marriage. It also helps that the love story, the film's least compelling device, is entwined with at least two other plots, Rosina passing as gentile and developing as an artist. And her photographs (the ones she takes as well as the ones she composes for the mightily unimaginative Charles) are the most exciting element in the film. All of it -- the lighting, framing, color, and subject matter -- is enchanting. Goldbacher and cinematographer Ashley Rowe have done so well with the visuals, in fact, that they tend to overshadow the narrative. Or rather, the visuals become the narrative, as when the camera freezes Rosina's wise and self-conscious posing for Charles' camera, or her acute arranging of his naked body for her own investigative eye. And it appears that Driver's quick study of the ways that cameras can betray and hide all kinds of truths is serving her well: her Rosina is impressively substantial, believably exuberant and vulnerable.