After fresh start, 'Puccini' fails to commit

Is being a lesbian in Manhattan really as fabulously witty and kooky and fun as "Puccini for Beginners" makes it out to be? Where do I sign up?

The belated second feature film from writer-director Maria Maggenti , whose "The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love " was a sort-of-mainstream indie gay breakthrough in 1995, "Puccini" works hard to be effervescent, and it fizzes nicely before the tonic goes flat in the final third. If Woody Allen were a young, attractive gay woman, he might make something like this, or so Maggenti hopes. But it would probably be funnier, and it would definitely cut deeper.

No one gets hurt here, and that's the movie's charm and failing. Elizabeth Reaser plays Allegra, the film's opera-loving, devil-may-care heroine, and I found myself hoping all the characters would be named after prescription medications. Alas. When the movie begins, Allegra is breaking up with Samantha (Julianne Nicholson ), who wants commitment and is willing to shack up with a man to find it. "Bi is in, anyway," says someone here.

Thus Allegra finds herself flirting with Philip (Justin Kirk ), a Columbia assistant professor of philosophy with Jeff Goldblumesque height and inflections. Smitten, Philip breaks with Grace (Gretchen Mol), his dizzy yuppie girl-friend; on the rebound, Grace hooks up with Allegra as well. None of the three knows precisely who's been sleeping in each others' beds, but Allegra's friends, straight Molly (Jennifer Dundas ) and icy lipstick lesbian Nell (Tina Benko ), get laughs trying to keep score.

Tellingly, Grace and Allegra meet while coming out of a revival screening of "Holiday," that arch 1938 heartbreaker starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant and written by Philip Barry. "Puccini" wants to be as sophisticated as a Barry play and as appealingly neurotic as a Woody Allen movie, as sassy as "Sex in the City," and as hilarious as Preston Sturges . (The tempestuous melodrama of "The L Word, " by contrast, is explicitly rejected as drool-cup fodder for straight guys.)

All those influences and all that energy, and the movie shares its heroine's weakness: It's too self-conscious to commit. Maggenti keeps breaking the frame for mild meta-comedy, and she writes bright, sharp dialogue that doesn't draw blood: "You sound weirdly defensive; you never order tiramisu" or "I won't generalize about you if you don't generalize about me." The actors are willing as puppies and lik able, but for farce to work characters need to be knee-deep in their own mishegoss , not holding themselves warily apart as Allegra does. You can't be the novelist of your own misfortune. Well, you can, but that's tragedy.

Actually, Allegra is a novelist, although we never see her write -- nor Philip teach, nor Grace be a banker (she'd rather, um, blow glass, and we do see that). "Puccini for Beginners" is one of those Upper West Side baubles where no one works and everyone plays; a character says "New York's a small town" long after the point has been made. It takes a village to make a well-adjusted lesbian, I guess, and it takes this movie to slowly make her tiresome.