"At base, work is the same as love, the same gestures."-Passion Passion ponders what might be a definition of art-"not untrue but separate from the real world"-and then proceeds to disprove it. A film called Passion is being made by two East European filmmakers; visually, it is based on tableaux vivants of famous paintings. But because "you have to live stories before inventing them," the action moves offset to the snowy factory-suburb where the studio is located, with its very real dramas of labor and its labors of love. And as the factory workers revolt, so do the people in pictures (paintings and film); art is not separate, art is work as work is love. Isabelle Huppert is moving and a little scary as an anguished proletariat, and Hanna Schygulla's bourgeoise is interestingly evolved since Weekend. Godard's renditions of Rembrandt and Delacroix alone make Passion a viscerally exciting film but there is so much more, in the music (Mozart, Fauré and Ravel); in the elliptical narrative in search of its characters; in the characters who refuse to be written and whose emotions, therefore, jump off the screen-as-canvas. This is not a still life.