THURSDAY NOVEMBER 13 1997

CINEMA / Nigel Andrews

Another day, another maverick American. Henry Jaglom's films tend to be as good as the people in them. Since he has beaten the bushes of upper bohemia (New York State division) for the cast of Last Summer in the Hamptons, this is his best comedy of manners since Always. The late actress-teacher Viveca Lindfors and the manifestly alive stage director André Gregory, plus a gifted supporting cast, fill a Long Island mansion with talk and tears, psychobabble and quarrels - even with climatic gunshots - while rehearsing a production of Chekhov's The Seagull.

"A barrel of eels poisoning and electrocuting each other" says someone of everyone else. Each character is an actor offstage as well as on. So the drama student practising her animal impersonations (Jaglom's wife Victoria Foyt), is no different from the group's goddess-matriarch (Lindfors as a surrogate Arkadina), whose vatic banalities - "The most important is to allow yourself to feel what you're feeling" - come from a lifetime of fitfully sparking wisdom empowered by brief Hollywood stardom (which Lindfors actually had).

At moments Last Summer in the Hamptons seems like a seriocomic Woody Allen effort, without the chic Italian photography. But Jaglom does not need chic. Though the images are plain, the grace of his best films is in the people: in their funny pain and their painful idea of fun. The acting community's awareness of its own doomed triviality - "We could have been fighting child abuse or Republicans!" says Foyt - gives them the right to a little poignant self-importance.