GRAY by name, grey by nature, this wartime romantic drama is a dull, cold-tea disappointment.

Novelist Sebastian Faulks put on a brave face at last month's Cinema Days press screening, the former film critic giving this screen conversion an evasive six out of five when asked for his verdict. Frankly, it would have been better if Charlotte Gray had fallen by the wayside like two earlier projects seeking to transfer Faulks from page to celluloid.

Where Faulks is a multi-layered novelist, screenplay writer Jeremy Brock fails to match the emotional undercurrents of the book; and nowhere does he achieve the personal interplay he put into his splendid script for Mrs Brown.

Add chameleon actress Cate Blanchett and fellow Australian Gillian Armstrong, director of My Brilliant Career, Little Women and Oscar And Lucinda, and Charlotte Gray had looked as good on paper as it read. Alas not so.

Blanchett, soon to be seen playing American white trash in The Shipping News, adopts yet another accent, a delicate shade of Scottish, for her strangely muted performance as the supposedly strong-willed young woman of the title.

Parachuted behind enemy lines in occupied France for dangerous undercover work for the Special Operations Executive, Charlotte has an ulterior motive for arriving in Vichy: she hopes for news of her dapper British airman lover, Peter (Rupert Penry-Jones), reported missing in action on French soil.

Their whirlwind romance had never moved mountains, on account of the dashing Penry-Jones being under-used in earlier scenes, so there is no emotional tug of war when Charlotte finds herself unable to resist resistance leader Julien (American Billy Crudup, with a French accent). Like Penry-Jones, Crudup is fed crumbs, and so he too never acquires any appeal.

Scenes with Julien's father, Levade, are better thanks to Michael Gambon's skill at putting flesh on any old bones but ultimately Charlotte Gray, both film and screen character, lack the pioneering spirit she is supposed to possess. Nor do the constant risks taken by Charlotte ever set the blood pumping.

Updated: 09:04 Friday, February 22, 2002