Once enmeshed in the corny plot Okwe no longer seems human, but he isn't the throwback that Senay is. It's been a long time since we've had a defiled virgin as the star of an English-language picture, and there's a reason: the type is so outmoded that the audience could only be expected to laugh. (Watch Yvette Mimieux in Where the Boys Are (1960), staggering down the middle of the highway after a spring-break night out with the wrong sort of boys, and try to keep a straight face.) The moviemakers outsmart themselves with multicultural sensitivity. Senay is a Muslim and an impoverished, frightened immigrant, and so making her a sexual victim strikes them as embodying a progressive political stance. But restating this makes their mistake plain: a defiled virgin is such an antique device in English-language movies that one had to be imported. (Senay is supposed to be touching because she has to hide Okwe's sleeping on her couch not only from the immigration agents but, as a Muslim maiden, from the neighbors and her family and finally, we sense, from herself. You see, she's in love with Okwe, as Guo Yi, the wise Chinese friend--and thus another flabbergasting old-movie stereotype--points out to him.)

You'd think that one defilement would be enough even for the well-intentioned protestor, but Senay is raped twice, orally and vaginally, and loses her mind (temporarily) after her second blow job. Such extreme vulnerability has been pulled off only by the most delicate actresses the movies have ever known--Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms and Victor Sjostrom's The Wind (1928), and Nadia Sibirskaia in Dmitri Kirsanov's Menilmontant (1926; an astonishing experimental silent that, unlike the work of Eisenstein and Pudovkin, still hasn't been stylistically assimilated into mainstream moviemaking) and Jean Renoir's The Crime of M. Lange (1936; it helps that Renoir makes the seduction-and-betrayal plot end not only comically in a structural sense but with laughter). These incomparable actresses worked in an earlier era when such heroines straggled into the movies directly from 19th-century theatrical melodrama (though they were already retrogressive in comparison to George Eliot's Maggie Tulliver and Hetty Sorrel, not to mention Daisy Miller and Sister Carrie), and at a time when their directors were inventing the art of moviemaking.

Frears is a master director (Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons (1988), The Grifters (1990)) who can turn even this tripe into something savory, but finally I couldn't keep the story down. I felt put upon by these virtuous dopes who want us to identify with helpless Senay instead of resourceful Juliette. The frail heroines of the silent era were succeeded by illegitimate mothers and all kinds of suffering soap opera heroines right up to the present. (The movie version of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres (1997), starring Michelle Pfeiffer and Jessica Lange, is a recent shameful example, an artifact of the recovered memory hysteria of the '80s and '90s.) But who doesn't prefer the tough cookies of the pre-Code era, girls like Claudette Colbert and Barbara Stanwyck who knew what men were after and averted their horns like the most practiced (and cynical) of toreadors, or the experienced funny broads like Jean Harlow and Mae West who knew how to ride 'em for what they were worth? Even Where the Boys Are gives us a range of female characters and puts the shrewder girls played by Dolores Hart and Paula Prentiss at the center. Looking back we can still respond to the comediennes as heroines, whereas the victims are now objects of camp.