MOVIES : Hot From the Coven : Mike Newell, with fellow sorcerers Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman, cooked up a ‘mean little’ art film. You were expecting ‘Four More Weddings and a Funeral’?

You shan’t be seeing “An Awfully Big Adventure” being advertised as coming to you “from the director-star team that brought you ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’! “ Even though, of course, it is.

Touting the decidedly smallish art movie as a reunion between filmmaker Mike Newell and once-and-future heartthrob Hugh Grant would assuredly fill some seats that may otherwise go empty.

Then again, no one wants to run the risk of inciting the riots that might ensue if mainstream moviegoers primed for a lark on the level of “Weddings” got an ill-prepared gander of this “Awfully Big” tragicomedy, which has plenty of amusing moments but couldn’t be much darker if it were set smack in the middle of a solar eclipse.

Set in none-too-luminous Liverpool, England, just after World War II, it’s the coming-of-age story of a parent-less teen-age girl who joins up with a regional theatrical troupe, becoming romantically infatuated with Grant’s decidedly uninterested director character while striking up a cynical affair with an actor played by Alan Rickman. The piece deals rather frankly with sexual taboos encountered and enacted by its brashly naive heroine, as well as having bigger philosophical fish to fry.

Though the title might suggest a certain whimsy, it actually alludes to a line from the play “Peter Pan,” being produced by the movie’s Liverpool troupe, though unspoken in the film itself: “Death will be an awfully big adventure.” So when Newell says that “it’s a tiny little film, not a great, clattering, commercial event,” he’s not just being modest.

Plus: It’s very, very, very, very, very British.

“I suspect that for those who are kind, there must be a question in their heads that says, ‘Does he know what he did?’ ” Newell says with a laugh, knowing full well how a film this small-scaled and downbeat rates on the career-move scale. “For those who are not kind, of course, there will be a certain amount of pyre-dancing going on, I’m sure.”

On the other hand, at least there’s no danger that whatever discriminating audience there is for this will be troubled by mentally having to bridge the disparity between any screen virtues of Grant’s character and his recent off-screen exploits.

“Oh, indeed, the very reverse,” Newell says. “I mean, if anything, real life is going to prove the case of the character in the film.” Here, in a rare sort of more villainous turn, Grant plays what might be described as an unabashed sexual predator, albeit a homosexually inclined one.

“Aside from anything else, it’s a tiny-platform release, which I think is entirely wise. It’s not a conventional, middle-of-the-road, feel-good movie the way ‘Four Weddings’ was. It brandishes its status as a European movie.”

Newell says Grant and Rickman each welcomed the chance to brandish, as it were, roles that end up being decidedly undashing.

“Oh, they took ‘em on, by God,” the director says. “Each of them solicited me. . . . Well, perhaps that’s a word we shouldn’t use in this context. Each of them wrote to me or contacted me saying, ‘I have unofficially read this script and would love to play the wrong part.’

“So it became a kind of witches’ coven between the three of us. I mean, we had this kind of devilish delight at producing this black, mean little piece of work where people’s expectations would be turned topsy-turvy.”

Is Newell’s descent into the veritable black arts with “Awfully Big Adventure” really a commercial death wish? Not at all. His production company, Dogstar Films, does have a deal with Disney, to produce the kinds of pictures that will have an unabashedly broad appeal and not suggest to their audiences that their makers might be burned at the stake. He wants to do, yes, American movies.

But Newell has no interest in making a sequel to “Four Weddings,” either literally or spiritually--”I don’t see what you’d do, ‘Four Divorces and an Even Sadder Funeral’?”--and at least talks a good, heartening talk when it comes to the inevitable issue of not letting his success ruin his better instincts.

“Because of ‘Four Weddings,’ I’ve got my crack at Hollywood--which traditionally us guys always [mess] up,” says the gregarious director, whose very proper articulation is occasionally punctuated by unexpected candor. “But it’s like being a gambler and being taken to Las Vegas, and then being asked, ‘Would you prefer actually not to play Las Vegas?’ You cannot do it. If you make films, it’s the biggest game in the world. . . . So it’ll be great to have a go. And of course I’ll get [messed] up. Of course I will. But that’s all right.”

As it turns out, “Awfully Big” was already into production before it was clear that “Weddings” was an international smash, so, as Newell acknowledges, “We had nothing to be self-protective about at that point.”

But he’d like to believe that he would have struck out on the same path even possessing a sense of his and Grant’s commercial worth and that like, say, Stephen Frears, he will be able to alternate small, European pictures with the expected big American ones.

“Well, I’m sure going to try,” Newell says. “Why not? There is a kind of emotional health that is conferred on you by making things that are very personal to you, like this one. And there’s a degree perhaps--at least for us--of ill health in just cutting that out and saying, ‘No, you can’t do that anymore--you’ve now got to go and fulfill your potential’ like some kind of East German athlete.

“Well, there are two kinds of English, aren’t there?” he suddenly wonders aloud, without skipping a beat. “There are the English who come and live in Hollywood--and they’re very effective, people like Ridley Scott and Adrian Lyne, that lot--and there’s the English who try to have a foot on both continents, like Hugh, [Neil] Jordan and Stephen [Frears], that sort of person. And inevitably, I think, I’ll be one of the latter.”

I f “An Awfully Big Adventure” does turn out to be Newell’s valedictory “tiny” movie, for a while anyway, it’s not purely out of a place of perversity that he made it, the aforementioned coven notwithstanding. As touching as it is wickedly amusing, the picture doesn’t come by its sense of tragedy by rote.

Newell, 53, was interested in Beryl Bainbridge’s novel and Charles Wood’s screenplay partially because of his own memories of being a boy in postwar London, having uncles and such with “dazzling careers as army officers who at the end of the war went back to selling women’s skirts. You know, you’d go from being a commando in Burma to selling hosiery. I’d always been interested in what kind of a world that made it.”

Much more, though, it was the gender of the central figure that intrigued him. And though “Awfully Big” is in some sense a rich ensemble piece, it is particularly remarkable in capturing the contradictions of a girl (played by Georgina Cates) who is, in one sense, extremely practical and unsentimental about a concept like virginity yet utterly still a child in key emotional ways. It’s a cusp not often captured.

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to achieve a kind of female Holden Caulfield?” Newell says. “The thing that really appealed to me was the coming-of-age story, which was never a genre that I’d liked. I’d found it actually rather dull when applied to boys as it normally is. All that bonding and smoking and being persecuted by your gonads.

“But I was really interested in trying to see your first steps in life really clearly through the eyes of a girl--and not an easy girl, either, not a girl sentimentalized but a real girl.

“I’d had teen-age girls in my house recently”--not his and his wife’s own offspring, who are younger, but daughters of friends from the English countryside who came to stay in the city for long periods--”and I’d observed what they were like. I had observed my own reactions to them as well, the way they drive you mad, and I mean quite mad, because they are so arrogant and head-tossing, and they’re completely fragile in the same moment.

“Of course what’s delightful about it is you wish that you could have their eyes; you wish that you could see the world with all the skins off the way that clearly they do.

“It’s not that it’s trickier” to do a girl’s coming of age than a boy’s, “it is that it isn’t done . The thing about girls is that I’m sure that women do try to educate girls in the pitfalls, do try to draw girls road maps, but those maps are much, much more private than the maps that are drawn for boys. There is a kind of anthropological mystery about women at the point when they become. . . ,” he says, before trailing off, deciding he’s sounding a bit too pompous.

He also notes that “adolescence was a time of great optimism and also a time of very dark fears.”

In the rather fatalistic movie, the fears turn out to be somewhat justified. The ending isn’t a particularly hopeful one, and at some early screenings, patrons have walked away with seeming shock at the lack of quarter given them. Newell says that, with a budget of about $4 million (it was conceived as a British Broadcasting Corp. project before landing as a theatrical release), he could afford to go out on a downer: “At this price, we’re gonna rub your nose in it,” he says with a laugh. “Another couple of million dollars, maybe we’d need to take out some insurance.

“One of the guys at Fine Line constantly said, ‘Yes, but what does it mean? Why isn’t it upbeat? Doesn’t she learn anything?’ And I always resisted that, always. She is a very present-tense character. She receives it all like Elsa Lanchester waking up as the bride of Frankenstein--it’s now . And that was going to be just as important in the tragic part of things as it was in the comic part of things.

“I worried greatly about the title. If it was up to me, I’d call ‘em by their budget numbers. But the line from ‘Peter Pan’ makes sense because when he knows he’s going to die and says, ‘Death will be an awfully big adventure,’ Peter Pan has absolutely that mixture of optimism and terror that the girl’s character has.”

Although it might be handy to suggest that Newell himself feels those conflicting emotions while coming of age in the American studio system, it’s helpful to remember that interspersed with his well-regarded “Dance With a Stranger” (1985) and “Enchanted April” (1992) were rather more commercially minded pictures like “The Awakening” (1980) and “Amazing Grace and Chuck” (1987). Unlike other Britons who have set up production companies based on their first real English hit, a naif he isn’t.

“I’m not a blushing virgin about these things. I have tiptoed down this road before and have been smashed on the bridge of my nose for my pains, so I know where it will and where it won’t be fun. But,” he says with a wistfulness perhaps not entirely foreign to his heroine’s, “I still long to have my share.”*