OxfordPress.com

Grade: C+

Verdict: A star-crossed love affair that seems too familiar.

Details: Starring Ioan Gruffudd and Nia Roberts. Rated R for sexuality and a scene of violence. In English, Welsh and Yiddish, with subtitles.

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Review: After hiding the fact that he's Jewish from his Christian girlfriend for weeks, Solomon (Ioan Gruffudd) finally explains to her, "I just couldn't see how to put the pieces together."

If anything, the star-crossed melodrama "Solomon & Gaenor" puts its pieces together too predictably. Set in a gloomy Welsh village in 1911, it tells of the forbidden love between Solomon, son of Jewish merchants, and Gaenor (Nia Roberts), daughter of a churchgoing family of miners.

They meet one afternoon when Solomon is traveling door to door, selling cloth samples. Instantly smitten, Solomon is soon paying formal visits to her family, including her father, Idris (William Thomas), and gruff, menacing brother Crad (Mark Lewis Jones). There's just one catch. He tells them his name is Sam. And en route to Gaenor's home, he stashes his tallit (prayer shawl) in the chinks of a stone wall.

As you might expect, soon after Solomon and Gaenor have started sneaking off to make love in a (distractingly overlit) stable, trouble breaks around them. Gaenor's family are anti-Semitic, but Solomon's kin are no better: They let him know he will be dispossessed if he takes up with a shiksa.

Writer-director Paul Morrison gives his film a poetic kind of gravity. But he never throws any narrative curveballs that might have made the story more than a misty, damp echo of "Romeo and Juliet." Gruffudd and Roberts are attractive performers, but they never make their characters seem like much more than plot devices.

Speaking of plot devices, Solomon's masquerade as a Christian seems unlikely, given the way that the townsfolk are depicted as such a xenophobic, tight-knit community. In the suspicious world Morrison shows us, it doesn't seem that any secret is possible.

— Steve Murray, Cox News Service