Nouvelle France has an ambitious reach: a Canadian historical epic fashioned as a would-be commercial blockbuster about a doomed love affair. Think of it as Canadian Heritage Minutes by way of Titanic. Celine Dion even sings the closing ballad.

The love story of well-born fur trapper François (David La Haye) and spirited miller's daughter Marie-Loup (Noemie Godin Vigneau) unfolds between 1758 and 1761, during the conquest of New France by Britain. The supporting cast is a roll call of period-piece heavy-hitters like Gerard Depardieu, Vincent Perez, Jason Isaacs (as General James Wolfe), Tim Roth (as William Pitt the Elder) and Irène Jacob -- though 13-year-old Juliette Gosselin steals the show as Marie-Loup's precocious daughter, one of few properly fleshed out fictional characters. Other historical figures who show up amid the dramatization include Benjamin Franklin, Voltaire and Madame de Pompadour.

Veteran Quebec director Jean Beaudin does a decent job of bringing the history books to life, and the look of 18th-century Canada and Europe -- from natural vistas to lavish royal courts, open markets and prisons -- is lushly rendered by cinematographer Louis de Ernsted. But the epic only sporadically achieves the lyrical depth and heft needed for such a big task. The thin love story groans with overblown melodrama while the most dramatic moments in Canada's early history -- such as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham -- are skipped altogether.