Starring Noémie Godin-Vigneau and David La Haye. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, October 21, at the Granville 7

It's never a good sign when, while watching a historical drama, one can't help wondering where the actors were able to get collagen injections in the middle of the 18th century. Maybe if director Jean Beaudin (is this really the same cat who helmed the extraordinarily good Being at Home With Claude and J.?A. Martin Photographe?) had been able to pull his camera away from star Noémie Godin-Vigneau's lips for more than 30 seconds at a time, this obsessive thought wouldn't have been so intrusive, but the sad truth is that this temporary relief would have just drawn my attention to Nouvelle-France's myriad other flaws.

Boasting an impressive international cast (most of whom do ludicrously brief cameos: blink and Tim Roth's William Pitt is gone) and clearly trying to appeal to the international market (hence the lack of Québécois accents, despite the fact that joual is much closer to old French than any contemporary equivalent), this two-and-a-half-hour ordeal is being presented as some kind of epic, although it's really nothing but a bodice ripper, even though very few bodices actually get ripped.

The rippee of the piece is Marie-Loup Carignan (Godin-Vigneau), a miller's daughter with a young child of her own, not to mention a strong appreciation of First Nations culture (although why Acoona, her teenaged protégée, is Innu rather than Huron or Iroquois is anyone's guess). The ripper of this pas de deux is Franí§ois le Gardeur (David La Haye), a rebellious aristocrat who also likes to hang out with the aboriginals (curiously enough, for all its sympathy for Native people, Nouvelle-France's painfully strained plot frequently pivots on the machinations of a black character who is almost Jacobean in her villainy).

The year is 1759, and New France is on its last legs. While Marie-Loup and Franí§ois try (vainly, for the most part) to consummate their love, corruption and betrayal surround them on all sides, and then the English blunder in (the fall of Quebec might be the worst battle sequence ever filmed, poorly choreographed and clumsily connected to awful matte paintings; thank God Beaudin's conquest is mercifully brief).

The embarrassments, unfortunately, don't end there.

The secondary performances are so awful they make even the wasted efforts of the principals seem masterful; the dialogue (courtesy of Pierre Billon) is chock-a-block with anachronistic howlers, and the music is so insistent and overstated you want to tell it to shut the fuck up.

Ordinarily, I'm a big fan of both Québécois cinema and period pieces, but Nouvelle-France does a grave disservice to what should have been two of my favourite things.