So why is the glossy new La Boheme film - which has two screenings at the Bryn Mawr Film Institute (7 p.m. tomorrow and 1 p.m. Oct. 25) and a mid-December home-video release - more likely to arouse healthy curiosity than lasting affection? As much as a fine La Boheme is heard, the visual element is just reasonably pleasing and not fully engaging.

The stars alone, Anna Netrebko and Rolando Villazon as Mimi and Rodolfo, are enough to make many opera people have a look, especially since Puccini's music fit their voices perfectly in the soundtrack recording that was issued before the film was shot (and is one of the best). In contrast to performance videos, which don't do any pretending with the built-in contrivance of the operatic medium, most photo-realistic portrayals of opera try to tell you that the contrivance is real. Here, it weighs heavily on the singers.

In this story of starving artists loving and hating each other in wintertime Paris, most singers have a fish-out-of-water quality. Villazon has all the physical spontaneity that most of the other singers lack, but it's often too big for the camera's merciless gaze.

Most opera films have lip-synch lapses - exceptions are the excellent The Death of Klinghoffer and Trouble in Tahiti, both sung live on camera - and though this Boheme is better than most, even momentary lapses take you out of the story as well as the film. One feels more bemused than sympathetic when the anguished Netrebko reels around in the snow in Act 3, her mouth and voice seeming like only casual acquaintances. Sometimes singers are seen in the background but heard in the foreground.

Purely in moviemaking terms, the direction by Robert Dornhelm (whose credits include a TV mini-series version of War and Peace) ranges between quite good and not so good - though never is it stupid. Atmospherically speaking, this film is consistently right. Only orchestral introductions use what appear to be on-site scenes of Paris; much of what later pass for exterior shots are in fact done on a nicely stylized interior set, which doesn't let too much reality violate the operatic netherworld.

In the first act when the character of Mimi is healthy, Netrebko looks like she came from a makeup convention. Then again, this Mimi is a tad calculating: The lost-key ploy she uses to meet Rodolfo is usually the first the audience sees of the character, but in this film she's glimpsed in her own apartment with wheels turning between her ears. Later, when Rodolfo buys her a Christmas gift, the camera shows her at a shop window asking for more - an interesting undercurrent.

Then in comes Nicole Cabell as Musetta (the golden-hearted call girl) with eye-rolling sidelong glances worthy of Mae West and marvelously telegenic smiles. Her Act 3 confrontation with sometime-lover Marcello (Boaz Daniel) is anything but youthful sparring: They're serious.

The death scene, at first strangely, slips between color and black and white according to what character's viewpoint, the dying Mimi or the vital Rodolfo, is in play. The effect could have been questionable had it not been achieved with near-magical fluidity - and, like much in this film, is maybe best appreciated on the big screen rather than the forthcoming DVD.