According to Fisher, a research professor at Rutgers University, the bliss we feel when we fall in love is the result of elevated levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, which can result in sleeplessness, exhilaration and single-mindedness, among other things, and low levels of serotonin, which can set the mind racing toward obsession. What we’re feeling in those early throes of passion is an addiction, she says. Some may think this sounds like a just-so story with footnotes, but there’s something comforting in the notion that maybe it’s the dopamine talking when it’s 2 in the morning and you’ve been Googling your office crush for the past seven hours.

Fisher is a gamine 58-year-old whose fine-spun blond hair and modulated yet exclamatory manner recall Doris Day — if Doris Day were a Ph.D. with a penchant for giving no-nonsense advice to the lovelorn, reporters included. Among her tips? Don’t think you can fornicate frequently and indiscriminately without, à la “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one day waking up to find you’ve fallen in love with an ass. And maybe lay off the Prozac.

The big news in this book is an experiment in which you scanned the brains of people in love. And you found differences between men and women.

We weren’t even thinking of looking for that. Although I did write a book on gender differences ["The First Sex"], most of what I talk about is the evolution of a brain system that’s in everybody. I’m interested in why we’re all alike. What we discovered is that the parts of the brain that lit up and became active when someone falls in love are part of the reward system in the brain. And one of them is the ventral tegmental area, a tiny part in the midbrain, quite far down, that makes dopamine and sprinkles it around the brain. When the prefrontal cortex — the part behind your forehead, the thinking part — realizes that you are not getting your reward, those dopamine cells work harder and pump out more dopamine and you feel more motivation, more ecstasy, and that’s why — think of Romeo and Juliet — when there are barriers to the relationship, you try harder and you love harder.

On average, men tended to show more activity in two regions in the brain: One was associated with the integration of visual stimuli and the second was with penile erection. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. Everybody knows that men are highly visual — men spend their lives commenting on women, looking at porn, and the like. I believe these visual networks evolved 1 or 2 million years ago because men needed to look at a woman and size up her ability to give him healthy babies. If he saw that she was young and healthy and happy, it would be adaptive for him to become aroused to start the mating process. Men definitely fall in love faster than women — there’s good psychological data on that. And I think that’s because they are more visual.

And women?

Several regions associated with memory recall became active. And I couldn’t figure out why at first, and then I thought to myself, my goodness — for millions of years women have been looking for someone to help them raise their babies, and in order to do that you really can’t look at someone and know whether they’re honest or trustworthy or whether they can hit the buffalo in the head and share the meat with you. You’ve got to remember what they said yesterday, what they said three weeks ago, what they gave your mother two months ago at the midwinter festival. For millions of years women have had the hardest job on earth — raising tiny helpless babies for as long as 20 years. That is an enormous job. There’s no other animal on earth for whom motherhood is so complex. And if their husband died they’d have to expend an enormous amount of metabolic energy to find another one, and they’re that much older, and the clock is ticking — it’s an adaptive strategy to remember all these details.

So you’re saying this would explain why, a copious amount of undergraduate women’s studies notwithstanding, I feel myself turning into Alice Kramden when, during arguments with my boyfriend, I dredge up things he wishes I’d forget?

Women remember. It drives both sexes crazy. If women could forget a few things, it might be better for them. Men complain about their marriages much less than women do; they remarry faster than women do. Throughout their lives women have many more complaints during the marriage. But if men could remember a few things, it would probably be better for them too!

Falling in love seems too unpredictable and individual a process to qualify objectively. How was it possible for you to decide whether someone was sufficiently far gone to use them as a subject?

I established about 20 primary characteristics of romantic love, and I did it several ways. First I went through the last 25 years of psychological literature, looking for the things that come up over and over again. And I looked at poetry from around the world — from ancient Sumer, China and India [for similarities in the expression of love across time and history]. Other anthropologists use potsherds, arrowheads, all kinds of things, and it just seemed to me that songs and poems are artifacts, too. Then I created a questionnaire, which I gave to 430 Americans and 420 Japanese of all ages. And those candidates who said they were in love responded to the characteristics outlined in the questionnaire in positive ways.

So here are the basic characteristics: You lose a sense of self, your edges become porous — this person almost invades, but it’s a very pleasant invasion. Then there are mood swings — real giddiness and ecstasy when things are going well, but if you don’t hear from him via e-mail or phone, there’s despair.

But the main characteristic for me is obsessively thinking about the person. When I was interviewing people to put into the fMRI machine, the first thing I asked them was how long they’d been in love, because I wanted them really crazy — I wanted them in the beginning stages, because these machines are expensive, they’re time-consuming for everybody. So they had to be absolutely nuts. The second question I asked was, what percentage of the day or evening do you think about this person? And I was looking for those who said 85, 90 percent — as in, I can’t stop, she’s never out of my mind.

You say romance is brief because nature only wanted us absolutely nuts until we managed to conceive. After we have children, attachment, a different chemical reaction that results in feelings of stability, kicks in to bind a couple together to raise those kids. What would you say to those who find the prospect of attachment too monotonous to contemplate? And is the idea of “till death do us part” wishful thinking?

Americans come out of a farming tradition, as all Westerners do. The whole concept of “till death do us part,” that is our idea, because we have so much property. But we are probably built to be restless in long relationships. And now, when we break up — well, it’s not like the grasslands of Africa where you pick up your spear and walk off. You’ve got cars and houses and college educations to pay for. But for most of human evolution there was a lot of serial pair-bonding. You would form a pair bond for a while, have a child, break up, fall in love again, have another marriage, another child, break up again, and then somewhere in middle age probably form another long-term relationship — and maybe were adulterous on the side. From a Darwinian perspective, this makes sense. It enables you to raise babies in a stable partnership while you go out and collect more resources for the babies you have with an affair, or to have more babies if you’re a man.

We live a long time, and we’re nicely wired to fall in love several times in our lives. So this trend we have now of a long period of extended practice [with having different partners] before beginning a long attachment is a good one. Because we weren’t built to be happy; we were built to reproduce. Lust, romantic love, attachment, these three different systems, we all have them to various degrees, and some people find it easier to form a long-term attachment than other people do. And I do think that there’s a chemical basis to that. Divorce does run in families. Some people need thrills all the time — and if they do have a marriage they’re almost always adulterous within a couple years of that marriage. I think everyone of us lies in bed in night and tries to decide how we’re going to [find and keep love]. I mean, that’s the problem. We have a brain that can simultaneously feel deep attachment to one person while we feel mad romantic attraction to someone else.

It seems that in your book you caution against casual sex. Did I read you right?

All I say in the book is watch out. I’m not in the should business. But I do think knowing what we know about how these brain systems are connected, it might be worthwhile to keep an eye on whom you copulate with. Because casual sex might not be so casual. Most liberated contemporary adults have copulated with someone they will never love. And women are just as able to copulate without love as men. I think we have a real misunderstanding in this culture of the intensity of male romantic love and female sexuality. Three out of four people who kill themselves after a love relationship has ended are men, not women. Men are much more likely because they have fewer friends — so they put more into relationships than women. They’re not as expressive as women.

But neither women or men are too good at love ‘em and leave ‘em. You can be the other woman — for a while. But at some point some of that brain circuitry kicks in and you fall in love. These three brain systems — the sex drive, romantic love and attachment — are connected, particularly the romantic love and sex drive. When you fall in love you want to start hopping in bed with the person, in part because the elevated levels of dopamine associated with romantic love can trigger testosterone, the hormone of desire, of sex craving. But the reverse can happen — testosterone can elevate the activity of dopamine and you can fall madly in love with someone that you hadn’t intended to. And so a lot of people, the very young especially, they do a lot of sleeping around, and some can fall in love with people they don’t want to take home, don’t want to marry, could never have kids with, and boom! — they spend the next five years with this person and spend the rest of their lives wondering why they did that.

So the idea that one could always keep having sexual adventures without real emotional consequences, that’s a fairy tale we’ve been telling ourselves?

It’s not gonna happen. With orgasm, levels of oxytocin go up in women and vasopressin in men — they call these the satisfaction hormones because they do give a sense of calm and peace and security and often a cosmic sense of union. If you have enough of them with somebody you’re going to feel attached to them.

Another ostensible boon you caution against in the book is the use of antidepressants — specifically SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, which elevate serotonin levels. They can endanger our ability to fall in love?

If you’re about to kill yourself you should definitely take these medications. Or if you can’t get out of bed — no question about it, they can be absolutely essential to people. But the problem in America is that people are on them for months and years, and they don’t realize they are jeopardizing powerful systems that are connected. Of course, serotonin-enhancing medications blunt emotions — that’s the point. But these medications can affect romance and attachment in more subtle ways. SSRIs dampen the ability to have orgasms, which is a mechanism of attachment and a form of mate assessment. And if you’re not having an orgasm with somebody on a regular basis you are not juicing your brain with attachment chemicals.

A woman learns a great deal about a man in bed — is he patient, is he kind, does he persevere until she has her orgasm? The female orgasm is what they call fickle — it doesn’t always happen. That used to be regarded as a maladaptive trait, but evolutionary psychologists now think it’s a very adaptive one because it allows a woman to distinguish between Mr. Right and Mr. Wrong. So when you kill a woman’s capacity to have an orgasm you’re killing the mechanism by which she assesses potential partners. There’s a very sensitive ring of nerves outside of the vagina, and the clitoris is very sensitive, and these become less sensitive when you take SSRIs. And they are also mechanisms that help a woman reach orgasm.

From a male’s perspective, seminal fluid has dopamine and norepinephrine in it, as well as serotonin and testosterone and estrogen — all kinds of things they’ve now shown have an antidepressant effect. When a man doesn’t deposit them in the vaginal canal, [he's not able to influence a woman's mood positively, and therefore not able to] trick a woman chemically into liking him. So these courtship devices are being jeopardized. It’s a little bit like taking a medication that blurs your vision.

People from around the world are e-mailing you for relationship advice. Do you actually respond personally to them?

I would imagine the day might come when it’s too much for me. At this point it certainly is not. I do say to them, “I’m an anthropologist — I’m not in this business, I’m not a psychologist, but I’ll tell you, this is how I feel about it.” That whole chapter on how to control love in “Why We Love” — I wasn’t going to put that in there. And then I thought to myself, how could I write a whole book about love’s brain circuitry, about something that makes us suffer such despair when it goes bad, and not say one word about how to handle this? Of course I’ll take a lot of flak from my colleagues, but I take a lot of flak anyway — if you write a trade book you’re in trouble. But what is the point of information if you don’t broaden it out? In these e-mails, people are bleeding with despair. And I’m supposed to say, “I’m terribly sorry. I know all about this subject but I’m not going to talk to you”? You can’t do that to people!

So how can we control love?

The only one way I really know of to kick in that dopamine system and to help spark love, particularly in a long-term relationship, is to do novel things together. Novelty is associated with elevated activity of dopamine and norepinephrine — those are the same stimulants associated with cocaine and amphetamines. Novelty can step up that system. Some people can just go to a different restaurant. You don’t have to go skydiving. Other people, maybe they should.

That’s for sure. “As you apply your sunscreen,” one reads, “use that time to talk to God. Tell him how grateful you are for how he made you. Soon, you’ll be so used to talking to him, it might become as regular and intimate as shrinking your pores.” And what exactly are those aforementioned guys speaking out on? Comportment. They like girls who dress conservatively, wear as little makeup as possible, and don’t overreact if they don’t notice a new haircut. Thinking of asking a guy out? Revolve girls don’t. “Sorry,” they’re told. “God made guys to be the leaders. That means that they lead in relationships. They tell you they like you.” If you need distraction from that total bummer, there are charts ranking the “top ten random things” you can do to make a difference in your community or bond with your dad. Or calendar pages that designate celebrity birthdays as occasions to Pray for a Person of Influence. (Kelly Osbourne and Anna Nicole Smith, junior varsity prayer warriors have got your back.) As well as quizzes that pose such questions as “Are You Crushing Too Hard?” and “Are You a Good Daughter?”

Revolve was published in July after Thomas Nelson, the largest English-language Christian publisher, noticed that, on one of the company’s Web sites, teens were complaining that the Bible was too intimidating. Knowing that teen girls were hooked on magazines such as Teen People, CosmoGirl and Seventeen, the publisher decided to wrap an accessible translation of the New Testament in the trappings of an irresistible medium. “Reading the Bible is not as scary as it seems,” Revolve readers are assured. “The Bible is God’s love letter to us and an instruction manual and answer book for life, so we should read it with the same passion we’d have when we read a letter from our biggest crush.” The $14.99 love letter is doing big business: Since Revolve hit shelves this summer, it’s almost sold out of its initial print run of 40,000, and Thomas Nelson is about to print 110,000 more. The company is planning to ship new editions of Revolve every 12 to 18 months to update celebrity names and information on featured charities. A version for teen boys — as yet untitled — is also in the works.

Laurie Whaley, the 28-year-old Thomas Nelson brand manager who helped create Revolve, says that she’s gotten hundreds of e-mails from girls around the country gushing about the user-friendly Bible. “Just wanted to share what my girls thought of your new product,” one California girl wrote. “Exact words were ‘TIGHT!’” Some might sigh in dismay at the dropping of articles and the overenthusiastic deployment of slang to review God’s word. Whaley, however, is psyched. Her mission — to capture the attention of girls between the ages of 12 and 15 — most of whom come from Christian homes and are looking to understand their faith — has been accomplished.

Marsha Yaunches is a 17-year-old from a suburb in southern New Jersey who was introduced to Revolve by a youth pastor at her evangelical church. Though the beauty tips don’t thrill her — she’s “one of those people who wears sweatpants everyday to school” — she declares the book “really cool” because “it brings everything down to a girl’s level.” Meaning that it’s talking to her about her beliefs without patronizing her. “It’s not, ‘This is what so-and-so thinks,’” she says, doing an impression of an out-of-touch, possibly megalomaniacal authority figure. Amy McTeak, 16, from a suburb of Nashville, loves Revolve’s quizzes because they help her to examine, among other things, her dating standards. Amy, who says she will occasionally pick up a secular girls’ magazine if “Hilary Duff or Mary-Kate and Ashley are on the cover,” doesn’t see anything wrong with sprinkling some sugar on top of Scripture. “Back in the olden days, teens didn’t have so much to distract them from reading the Bible,” she says. “If this makes it fun, then it’s a good idea, as long as it’s taking God seriously, which this does.” Even Emily Ross, a 15-year-old Manhattanite who is a lector at her Episcopalian church, and who has definite opinions on hermeneutics, is enthralled. “You can’t always take the Bible literally,” she says. “It was written in a different time period.” But she still exclaims “Awesome!” within seconds of being shown a copy of Revolve, citing the “basic, common” language and the “Blab” columns, which give counsel on everything from pot smoking to tattoo wearing to the possibility of alien life.

Like the other Christian girls interviewed for this article, Emily is a regular churchgoer and Bible reader and does not relate to Seventeen and its sisters. “I’m not going to deny that I think about makeup and boys, which is what they’re always talking about in those magazines, but my life is more than that,” she says. Marsha agrees: “Most of the advice those magazines give is all nonsense. Some of it’s legit, but ‘hot sex tips’? I just don’t care about that.” Revolve appeals to these admittedly conservative teens because it acknowledges that they have inner lives and self-respect — aspects of their character that they feel are not discussed in mainstream teen magazines.

It’s not just Revolve that’s affirming teenage girls’ spirituality. Marsha and Amy are also avid readers of Brio, a monthly magazine that’s been published by the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family since 1990. As with Revolve, the aim is to make you pretty on the inside through frequent applications of the Word. Brio, which has a circulation of 160,000, delves into fashion (the spreads may have a Sunday circular aesthetic but feature labels found at Urban Outfitters) and music (Evanescence gets chastised for writing songs in which “sleep, daydreams and death are the best means of escape”). And last year the vocal quartet Point of Grace launched their Girls of Grace conferences — think Promise Keepers with makeovers, designed expressly for the Lizzie McGuire set. The consistently sold-out events, which have been held in churches all over the country, have drawn 40,000 teens to date.

Whaley — who says Revolve’s title refers to a “twist on tradition” — admits she can understand how using facials as a metaphor for the cleansing power of God’s love could be considered silly. “Some of the tips, I grant you, are a little cheesier than others,” she says. “The men in my office just don’t get the one about foundation,” she says, referring to this nugget: “You need a good, balanced foundation for the rest of your makeup, kinda how like Jesus is the strong foundation in our lives.” But she set them straight. “I told them, ‘Well, you’re not going to get it, because you don’t put foundation on every morning.’” Whaley doesn’t think that discussing makeup and boys contradicts or cheapens the text it surrounds. “If you look at the New Testament and the life of Christ, he was coming to people where they were. He wasn’t high and mighty. Jesus himself was a part of culture, and he understood using culture to communicate his message. We’re just living out the New Testament. We’ve done nothing to change the message — all we’ve done is change the packaging.”

Those who haven’t been raised in evangelical churches, which hold fast to Paul’s command for wives to submit to their husbands, might take issue with the Bible’s brand of gender politics. “We’re not talking about for the rest of your life,” says the Nashville-raised Whaley, a third-generation pastor’s kid, of Revolve’s no-calling-boys rule. “We’re talking about 12- to 15-year-old girls, and what we’re saying is ‘Hey look, your minds are really young and formative. Let’s guard them.’” Parents of boys whose houses had been firebombed by phone calls from overzealous girls have called Revolve to thank them for recommending caution, Whaley says. And she has yet to receive a letter from a teenage girl writing in protest — in fact, she’s mainly just been catching flak from incredulous media professionals. “Often people will try to find anything to pick on — anything that goes contrary to what could be equality,” she says. “But that’s not what we mean to do at all.” (Thomas Nelson is, however, taking out the sentence about God designating guys as leaders, because “it’s been misinterpreted,” says Whaley.)

Is it merely a coincidence, then, that Thomas Nelson published only a version of the New Testament, conveniently sidestepping all those strong Old Testament women like Ruth and Esther? Whaley promises an Old Testament version soon; she says the only reason they launched Revolve with just one half of the Bible was to avoid a product that “was the size of the Sears Roebuck catalog.”

Brandon Holley, editor in chief of ElleGirl, says that though she finds the cheerful hawking of belief more than a bit creepy, Revolve’s packaging — and its reassuring approach — is right in line with how you’d market a secular teen magazine for that age group. “It’s very ‘I’m your best friend,’ very hand-holding. So if the publishers are going for a 12-to-15 age range, that tone is right. Girls at that age want to be comforted. They don’t want a challenge.”

Some worry that Revolve may be too comforting and feel that it’s risky to make the Bible over in our image — a trend that’s grown over last decade or so. Publishers want to keep attracting buyers for a very old product; so niche-marketed, value-added Bibles padded with devotional readings and other informational marginalia have been proliferating like Snapple flavors. If you are a father, a leader, a woman of color, a sports nut, or a lover of the painter Thomas Kinkade, there’s a Bible for you.

Paul Raushenbush, an associate dean of religious life at Princeton University who writes an advice column for teens on Beliefnet, believes, like Whaley, in reaching people “where they are,” but he worries that the packaging may undermine the strong truths of the Bible. “I can’t imagine another faith that would do this to its sacred text,” he says. “You would never see this in Islam, which views the Koran as completely sacred. You do want people to be comfortable with the Bible, but it’s not the same as Teen People. It takes study. It takes diligence. I’m worried that kids are going to think, ‘I get it. The Bible is all about me and my life in middle school.’” But Raushenbush, who’s writing a book of his own on teens and spirituality, admits that part of him finds Revolve kind of cool. “It’s too easy to bash people’s efforts. People are feeling so lonely, without a sense of grounding, and if this would help them at all, then great.”

It is kind of cool — in the sense that it’s refreshing to think that Revolve may be providing teen girls some sort of alternative to Britney Spears. But then again Revolve might just be a symptom of the culture that gave birth to the pop starlet. Perhaps the teen Bible is a pure product of America gone crazy, to borrow a line from William Carlos Williams — the result of a union between religion and capitalism. Beginning with the early 19th century, our brand of Christianity has always been marked by a desire to serve both God and mammon, says Steven Prothero, an associate professor of religion at Boston University and the author of the upcoming book “American Jesus.” “Nobody else is as successful as American Christians are in making Christians,” he says. “And nobody else stoops to such lows in doing so.”

Prothero says that this isn’t the first time Christian publishers have sold girls out on the way to a marketing revolution. “There was real resistance initially to adding anything to the Bible,” he says. “But it began in the 1800s with illustrated editions that featured pictures of female characters, and this was thought to be a way to sell the Bible to women — as if men could read it just for the text, but women would need some nice pretty pictures. Items like this were initially controversial, but they eventually sold more than regular Bibles.”

Raushenbush thinks that since Revolve is a highly irregular Bible, it shouldn’t be sold as one. “It should be viewed as an interpretation,” he says. Perhaps then it should be marketed as a tool for discussion about the Bible’s teachings, and should be labeled as such, so kids don’t mistake Jesus as the author of dictums on, say, who should call whom.

Revolve has been serving just that purpose for Liz Powell, the director of the high school girls’ ministry at Fellowship Alliance Chapel in Medford, N.J., which Marsha attends. Powell loves Revolve because she’s never before seen girls, usually too overscheduled to make time to read the Bible outside church, so captivated by it. “The girls are having as much fun with the quizzes and columns as they do with the Teen People and CosmoGirls they bring on the bus for youth group trips. It’s a format that encourages them to look at very topical things from God’s perspective.”

Powell tells a story about how the book caused a heated debate about, of course, which gender was biblically mandated to pick up the phone. The upstanding young men in her youth group said if the girls didn’t, “they were never gonna get a date.” But the girls said they preferred being pursued. One of them is Marsha, who when asked, looks up the verse from Paul’s first letter to Timothy that supports her stance: “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent.” Does she really believe that? Marsha pauses, her voice full of bravado and query — a mix of notes that wouldn’t be easily quantified in a focus group or by a pie chart. “To an extent,” she says. “I mean, not if men are wrong and we’re right — which we are most of the time.”

After a few years of confidence shaking she came out the other end with a graduation short film that won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, with one more Prix du Jury and an acclaimed feature, “Ratcatcher,” to her name, Ramsay has been dubbed one of Britain’s finest young filmmakers by the U.K. press.

“Ratcatcher,” which was released in the U.K. last year but is opening in the U.S. now., takes place in Glasgow, Scotland, during a garbage strike in the ’70s. At its center is James Gillespie (William Eadie), a desultory 12-year-old haunted by his implication in a playmate’s death. To escape his occasionally drunk dad (Tommy Flanagan), long-suffering mom (Mandy Matthews) and snappish sisters, he buses to the end of the line and knocks about in the fields behind the empty homes of a new housing estate. Or he shuffles between Kenny, a kid with a speech impediment and an idiot savant-ish obsession with animals, and a gang of wannabe toughs, who practice being men on James’ friend, Margaret Anne.

That’s not much in the way of story, but Ramsay creates cinema the old-fashioned way — with silent, moving pictures. Like her patron saint, she sees the things others overlook. The power of “Ratcatcher” comes from Ramsay’s ability to visually articulate all sorts of indescribables: the pinched grief on James’ dad’s face as he and his mom dance their way through apology and forgiveness; the quiet contentment between James and Margaret Anne as they sit watching television.

I interviewed Ramsay in a New York hotel room during a press tour for “Ratcatcher.” She drank room service Budweiser and chain-smoked while answering away — with the occasional giggle breaking through her rapid-fire Scottish accent.

You wrote in one of the British papers that you felt that movies should provide an unquotable experience, that they should leave you feeling wordless. And it seems that you give that to the viewer with “Ratcatcher.” You do an extraordinary job of evoking people’s interior lives without much dialogue. Since the film feels more composed than scripted, how did you go about writing it?

I knew that I wanted to write about a young boy because I had never done that before. And I thought it was interesting because they have a bit more peer pressure to be desensitized and not express their emotions from a very early age, so that interested me. Also, I didn’t want to write a cute kid, you know, the kid who’s seen as the innocent victim. Right away we present this kid [James] whom the audience questions. But I start off the film with a much conventionally cuter kid and then shock the audience out of complacency by introducing who you think is going to be a main character and then kill him off.

For me, the script’s not the final product, it’s just a working process. People always know that it’s always going to be a bit stressful working with me, but hopefully we’ll get results! It’s a bit like taking photos, actually, writing a script. You look at people, you listen to people, you look at the details, the body language that says something about them. So I guess being a photographer helps. But it’s like taking photographs you’d always really want to take but could never quite get.

So how did you get from photography to directing?

I think I was provoked to apply because someone said, “Oh, you’ll never ever get in, you need to have made a film,” so I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll just send in some stills and see what happens.” With my stills I was documenting my life, going to clubs, some of the early rave scene. I was doing quite surreal still-life work, and I knew the school wouldn’t accept me as a director, so I thought I’d apply as a cinematographer because then I could shoot documentaries and I could shoot fiction. But I had no idea what it really involved!

I made a lot of mistakes, but then I saw that those mistakes could be something that would work emotionally. I would maybe shoot a whole scene with the same lens and people would say, “Oh, you can’t do that,” and I would crop someone’s head off while they were speaking a really important monologue. I was trying to think of interesting ways to get psychological insight into the character, but some people thought I was bonkers.

Because in film school a lot of the scripts for the short films, especially, they were really formulaic with a punch in the end, a twist in the tale. And I thought, “This means nothing to me; why I am shooting this?” Because I had to really understand it even as a cinematographer. Is this camera here for stylistic reasons? Explain it to me. So I was trying to think why I was putting the camera where it was. I think that helped me later as a director; you know, you’re always looking for a reason, always looking for a kind of logic — even my own illogic kind!

What did your parents think of all this mastering of fine arts?

They thought, “When is she going to be done with school?” But when the first film I directed went to Cannes, Francis Ford Coppola gave me the Prix and the press came to them in Glasgow, they were like, “What the hell?” They were really chuffed that I was going to Cannes but it was something abstract as well. I think that’s when it started kicking in for them. We didn’t have any money growing up, but they were great. My mom was a cleaner and dad had odd jobs, was unemployed for a bit, managed a bar and an outdoor market. They were cool about me doing something arty-farty and not knowing what I was doing, switching from painting to film or whatever I was doing.

What do you think about getting all those Prix and having the film garner you all this attention?

This can really ruin your work, this kind of recognition. But I just keep putting the pressure on myself. I try and make myself scared. It’s not the most important thing in the world to make a film, but you’ve got to feel like that in order to get it done.

For your next project, you’re directing and co-writing a screenplay adaptation of the Alan Warner novel “Morvern Callar,” with Samantha Morton in the lead. I’m wondering what you saw in the book, because it seems like your filmmaking and his prose — both kind of dense and spare at once, both letting the somewhat bizarre flower out of the ordinary — seem perfectly matched.

I chose it because it was a really original voice — I hadn’t read a young girl like that for a while. Morvern’s a mixture of a woman and a man. She doesn’t analyze herself, which is a traditionally female thing to do — I mean, I do it. But she’s very much in the moment. She works in the fruit and vegetable section of a supermarket and by this bizarre event completely reinvents herself. She’s thinking, “I don’t know who I am in the world and in relation to other people, but it’s OK to be floating out there.”

I think a lot of young people can relate to that — I really relate to that. Sam’s exactly like the kids I worked with on “Ratcatcher.” She’s really open, she’s really instinctive. She has had some training as an actress, but she reminds me of other people that I worked with who are not professional actors. And probably the rest of the cast will be unprofessional. If you cast actors and nonprofessionals they both help each other. It doesn’t always work, but if you get the right combination … We’ll start shooting in February.

You’re living in London now, so what’s your relationship to Glasgow, now that you’ve grown up and out? It seems, too, from the film that you kind of point out the city’s split personality — the neighborhood is rough, but there’s a lot of tenderness between the people who live there.

It’s a very beautiful and very ugly city in places. You get a backdrop of mountains and then you have these really tough urban environments. Something about it being a tough place really shapes the people. I always think you need some therapy when you leave Glasgow! Actually, London has given me a wee bit of perspective on it, but I’m always drawn back to it, you know. I love it. Even if you go into town and don’t know anybody or you get on the bus someone will speak to you. I tend to be quite bad about compliments. When someone says, “Oh, that was really good, Lynne,” I tend to say, “Oh, shut up.” I think that’s a real Glaswegian thing, that.

At times, the film feels like a pictorial poem to childhood — at least, with James, that point in childhood where you’re hanging around waiting for adolescence. There are so many great details — how James scuffs new unwanted shoes with beer-bottle glass, how his little sister is always kind of flirting with their dad, the way the kids sit and cringe while their mom dances in the living room, but you know they secretly love it.

Yeah, I’m making these tiny little things the focus of the drama rather than them being in the background. But those details are kind of quite universal and actually remove it from being a film set in Glasgow, which I was trying to paint as a landscape that felt like it could be past, present or future. I get asked if the film is autobiographical — I mean, I did grow up in housing estate in Glasgow — but it’s really more personal. I went to Latvia last week and people were saying to me, “That was my childhood.” That’s such a joy, whether you look at photographs or films or read a book and recognize something like that. I know I don’t like that barrier up where someone says, “I’m so clever that you can’t understand this,” so I was trying to make something quite rich and quite sensual and textured. Some people will like that and some people will find it dull. It’s not got any car chases in it, but I think it’s got its own drama, and even the violence is tiny, it’s got small violences — one of the kids sends his mouse to the moon on the string of a balloon, but it becomes a very brutal act.

What was going on in Latvia?

“Ratcatcher” was an entrant in this film festival there — part of it, in addition to an official award, was this lottery involving some kind of magic pebble. And the lottery consisted of this weird, almost pagan, ceremony where for some reason they had this big carp, this big fish, in a tank at the side of the stage, and everyone was like, “What the hell is going on?” There were, like, 18 directors and we all got up onstage, and then they took the fish out of the tank and a Japanese guy started beating the fish over the head and started making sushi out of it. I thought they were going to make us eat the sushi and find the magic pebble in the sushi. But no, this was just part of the ceremony. And then this guy brought up a tray of Jack Daniel’s with cream or something so you can’t see through the liquid, and he goes under a black cloth onstage and puts the magic pebble — which was in the tank with the fish — in a drink, and then we each took a glass. One of the other directors pointed to my glass and then I said, “Oh, I think I’ve got it,” really quietly, and then they dragged me up to the front wearing this mustache of Jack Daniel’s and cream. I saw it on telly in Latvia the next night and it was so embarrassing. And I won $10,000 — which they gave to me in cash. It’s probably Mafia money.

On “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant,” the band’s fourth record, strings, flutes and trumpets filigree pristine melodies. The result, as on their earlier albums, has all the rock ‘n’ roll kick of a teacup rattle. But that beloved wit is rare: Murdoch and the band seem tired of consoling with tragicomic parables of boys who need to put the book back on the shelf and girls who have split ends and VD. They almost sound determined not to be the poster children for unforgivably fey sensitivity — the role they played in the film “High Fidelity,” in which a concave-chested record store employee was mercilessly razzed for listening to one of their records.

Instead, the album features an “issue” song (“The Chalet Lines,” about a girl who’s been raped). And Murdoch’s given up the winking references to dirty dreams for sex itself, a development reinforced by the sinuous, suggestive string section of “Don’t Leave the Light on Baby.” Like the nine other compositions, both songs are slow of tempo and devoid of the irony and insouciance that made Belle & Sebastian semi-famous among record store employees and their friends. For the first few spins, the new angle makes for an infuriatingly soporific and chilly listen.

Which isn’t surprising. The last full length, “The Boy With the Arab Strap,” found the band in a rambling, diffident mood, unwilling to deliver — as they’d done on “Tigermilk” (the actual debut record reissued last year), “Sinister” and several EPs — instantly charming songs that were as wry and flushed with feeling as a just-confessed crush. But “Fold Your Hands,” with arrangements that are less music-box cutesy and more considered in their use of retro touches, is again a more polished attempt at ditching their rep as pent-up and way too precious.

The most affecting numbers — “I Fought in a War,” “The Model,” “There’s Too Much Love” and “Women’s Realm” — are all elegant, torchy songs that temper regret and befuddlement with resolve. They’re rather grown-up, and they’re all Murdoch’s doing. The songs written by the other members of the band don’t fare so well. The music for cellist/vocalist Isobel Campbell’s “Beyond the Sunrise,” is a lovely exercise in eerie acoustics, but her borderline hokey lyrics put wayward women in soft-focus (“Sir, come to me and I will keep you warm/Taste hope in my skin and faith with the dawn”). Coming from baby-voiced Campbell, the words just sound sentimental and naive. And violinist Sarah Martin’s first contribution, “Waiting for the Moon to Rise,” is pretty, but it’s basically just a standard folk-pop ballad about longing.

There is nothing wide-eyed or ordinary about Murdoch’s “Women’s Realm,” a serenade to a girl who’d rather hide out in a train station with a flashlight and homemaker magazines than face the world. Murdoch’s choirboy tenor pipes along, agile as a flute, as he moves through Glasgow, down silent streets, along the river and over to an empty dance hall where he dreams about “a boy, a girl, a rendezvous.” He’s unsentimental about their prospects, but not hopeless. “Are you coming or are you not?” he demands. “There is nothing that would sort you out/There’s nothing I could say or do/You’re going to crash, I’ll set the bails in front of you.” It’s a new tenderness for the band, a state of grace achieved without cheek or irreverence. On another record, it could be the start of a brilliant career.

At first listen, Broadcast may not seem much different from Portishead, Plone, St. Etienne or Stereolab — any band that writes traditional songs with electronic instruments. Or they may also bring to mind groups that raid the musical thrift store for inspiration. But Broadcast don’t look back to escape invention. Somewhere between Keenan’s incantations and the group’s deft meshing of synthesized sounds and live instrumentation the comparisons become irrelevant.

On “Noise,” the group exchanges the charming Casio fugues collected on their 1997 singles compilation “Work and Non Work” for symphonic film-score grandeur. Keyboardist Roj Stevens, bolstered by bassist James Cargill, guitarist Tim Felton and alternating drummers Keith York and Steve Perkins, uses his instruments to conjure tolling bells, muffled French horns, booming bass drums, ailing theremins and tangled wind chimes. “Until Then” proceeds with the minor-key lilt of an Elizabethan air — and then it’s knifed by an acid guitar lick. “Dead the Long Year” is chamber music as played on hissing and clanging pipes. And the swinging, spaced-out pop tunes, such as “Papercuts” and “City in Progress,” beg for the parenthetical subtitle “Theme From a Julie Christie Vehicle.”

Broadcast manipulate their equipment to give the music the rangy pulse of jazz. It’s electronic, but not shot full of skittering beats. The extra charge comes from the girl out front. Keenan writes in sighs and fables, singing lyrics like, “Be like the sun/Never gone,” “Oh, the wind will come” and “None of us know who we are/Since finding a mirror in words some of us have lost heart.”

Even when Keenan’s sentiments turn confessional, as they do in the stellar “Papercuts,” they come off as allegorical. “You can’t pretend ’cause I can see/You’re not the boy you used to be,” she begins, innocently enough. But when she comes to the line, “You said you wrote a page about me/In your diary,” her delivery insinuates that she’s not some ingenue — more like a chilly siren taking cues from Petula Clark and Emily Brontk. And if you follow her voice where it beckons, she seems to hint, you won’t be lured into afterparties, you’ll be left stranded on some imaginary moors, bewitched right out of the ’60s, right out of time.