"Then She Found Me," the directing debut of Oscar-winning actress Helen Hunt, is less noteworthy for its erratic parts than for its atmospheric whole.

Here's a film that whips loss, romantic yearning and the accelerating ticking of a woman's biological clock into a moody dramady that is by turns touching and exasperating.

Hunt portrays April Epner, a 39-year-old elementary school- teacher, and almost from the film's first frame it's clear that whatever her motives in making the film, Hunt wasn't trying to make herself look good.

April is wan and drawn and looks beaten down by life. Early on, her boy-man husband Ben (Matthew Broderick) declares that after only a year of marriage this isn't the life he wants. The now-solitary April sinks into a whiny funk.

Two things occur to change her outlook. The first is a relationship with Frank (Colin Firth), the single father of one of April's young students.

And then there's Bernice (Bette Midler), hostess of a popular daytime TV talk show who, just days after April has buried her adoptive mother, declares herself April's biological mama. April at first suspects this is some sort of perverse scam — Bernice is loose with the truth, at one point claiming that April is the result of a one-night stand with Steve McQueen on the Fourth of July. Moreover, Bernice's big brash personality is diametrically opposed to April's constricted tightness.

All this should make April happy. Within weeks of her marriage collapsing and her mother dying, she finds herself with a new man and a new mother.

But no. She wants a baby, too. And she gets one, though not by her new beau Frank. Instead the dad is her feckless ex. This complicates things.

Hunt, who also co-wrote the screenplay from Elinor Lipman's novel, scrupulously avoids anything that smacks of TV sitcom humor. This is admirable, but the result is one of the glummest romantic comedies in recent memory.

Part of the problem lies with Firth's Frank, a guy who can veer so unexpectedly from doting lover to apoplectic antagonist that you wonder if he has an undiagnosed brain tumor. Firth is one of the movies' most reliable heartthrobs (just ask any woman), but here he injects so much tension into his scenes that it's hard to get into a romantic mood.