When the central couple of writer-director Patricia Rozema’s When Night is Falling (1995) finally have sex after a prolonged game of will-they-or-won’t-they, their time in bed together is crosscut with images of two women pretzeled in various positions mid-air, a perilously skinny trapeze bar the only thing, besides white knuckles and vigilantly connected limbs, keeping them from plummeting. This juxtaposition of imagery doesn’t come out of nowhere — one half of When Night is Falling’s pair of same-sex lovebirds is a circus performer named Petra (Rachael Crawford) — but the straight face with which Rozema presents the rather heavy-handed metaphor is a good encapsulation of the film’s larger approach. It’s all pretty silly, not unlike the sorts of gooey romance novels that do their best business in airports, and Rozema’s decision to present everything with self-serious solemnity only accentuates that.

It’s at least easy to root for its main couple and be frequently enthralled by cinematographer Douglas Koch’s sensuous camerawork. When Night is Falling’s romance is barbed with uncertainty, not so much around whether its couple is fit for each other (though that can sometimes feel doubtful) but as it relates to identity. Camille (Pascale Bussières) superficially embodies success. She has a plum professorial role at a local college — unfortunately a religious one, with conservative-skewing politics that can take years to catch up with the latest cultural strides — and is engaged to a colleague, Martin (Henry Czerny), whom she’s been with for around three years. Both are on track to take over for the outgoing chaplain (David Fox), though it’s more than hinted that a joint appointment necessitates marriage, since Christian-university optics wouldn’t readily go for unmarried leaders who are also partners off campus.

Camille’s life, though, is about to change in a different way than she’s been expecting. The upheaval is forewarned by her beloved pet dog abruptly dropping dead one afternoon. (Her decision to keep him in the fridge for the time being, as well as a bizarre Frankenstein-like coda, serves as a sloppy closet metaphor the movie doesn’t pull off.) During a post-death trip to the laundromat, a bleary-eyed Camille meets and is comforted by Petra; a mix-up in their freshly cleaned clothes — intentionally engineered, it turns out, by the latter — leads Camille to the space where Petra and her fellow circus members perform for a switch-off. After some small talk, Petra confesses her attraction to Camille with a couple of guffaw-inducing come-ons: “You have an exquisite mouth” is soon followed by “I’d love to see you in the moonlight with your head thrown back and your body on fire.”

Rachael Crawford and Pascale Bussières in When Night is Falling.

Petra’s apologized-for directness freaks Camille out, but not, we can surmise, for the obvious reasons. It has more to do with Camille, a long practitioner of compulsory heterosexuality, being a lesbian and suddenly made to confront feelings she’s long tried to keep out of her mind. I should note, though, that I don’t know how confidently I can say that: Rozema tells us close to nothing about Camille or Petra’s backstories, keeping them slotted into rudimentary archetypes — the modestly dressed prude who could use a good time, the wild child preternaturally in touch with her desires — in a way that reminds me of YA novels, where characters are broadly written enough to be as obliging to reader-flattering self-insertion as possible.

When Night is Falling is very good at communicating the soul-aching pulls of desire; Bussières is convincingly conflicted in a facile role. (Crawford does what she can with a part that mostly needs her to be enticingly confident — an early semi-date sees the couple going paragliding at Petra’s behest — and astonishingly sexy, albeit occasionally prone to laughable theatrics like scaling the tree outside Camille’s office so that she can get a better look at her love interest.) But it’s also unshakably vacant, never developing its characters as people or meaningfully delving into their connection beyond their sexual attraction.

That would be more tolerable if the movie didn’t implicitly want to yoke Camille and Petra together in the long-term, their budding love optimistically presented not just as a mechanism for Camille to recognize who she really is. Yet for all the quibbles When Night is Falling might inspire, I also much prefer, in movies like it, sometimes-improbable fantasy to tragedy, which so regularly stains lesbian fiction that it’s become a much-eyerolled-at trope. Rolling one’s eyes is far more pleasant when the act is directed at a couple that makes it to the end intact, the future brighter than it’d been at the movie’s start.