The film is called "Anywhere But Here," but the sun-blasted alley where director Wayne Wang in a gray polo shirt and wire frame glasses is studiously contemplating an aging Mercedes could not actually be anywhere except Los Angeles. Indeed, to certain of the city's devotees, the view is as endearing in a downmarket way, as are, say, the wooden water towers that spike the Manhattan skyline to diehard New Yorkers. Among the signature features are a red bougainvillea flicking its papery blossoms over a pastel stucco wall; a glimpse of self-serve gas pumps; a neon motel sign; and, in the far distance, a haze of greenery denoting the wealthier enclaves of the city's Westside.

Based on Mona Simpson's 1986 acclaimed coming-of-age novel by the same name, "Anywhere but Here" (set to open in April) stars Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman as a runaway wife and her teen-age daughter who have pulled up stakes from small-town Wisconsin and driven straight toward the sunset as if it were their future.

When Mr. Wang calls for action, pausing for a moment between syllables as if to give everyone a chance to collect themselves in the 90 degree August heat, the women begin hauling household paraphernalia out of the Mercedes and up two flights of stairs to a dull-windowed apartment overlooking the alley. As the relentlessly starry-eyed Adele, Ms. Sarandon is making yet another move to establish herself and her reluctant offspring in the glamorous life of her dreams. But it is a life that like the city of Beverly Hills itself remains tantalizingly just over the horizon.

"It's almost like Dorothy going to the Emerald City," Mr. Wang has observed earlier, in the far cooler confines of a 20th Century Fox sound stage. "There's something kind of pure and very romantic" about Adele's aspirations.

And something poignant about her disappointments. "She takes a look at a glamorous suite in a hotel in Beverly Hills," the producer, Laurence Mark, explains. "And of course she ends up at the Holiday Inn." Nonetheless, it is emblematic of this mother-daughter relationship that Ms. Sarandon -- decked out for some midwestern vision of a patio party in pedal pushers, collared cardigan and dangly earrings -- flutters around the car offering advice and searching for her purse, while Ms Portman, as the 14-year-old Ann, is stuck with the heavy lifting.

The notion of Los Angeles as a Janus-faced temptress has been done before, of course, but Ms. Simpson's novel delineates the specificities of gloss and seediness with an abundance of detail that seems to have inspired everyone from location scouts to the screenwriter Alvin Sargent ("Julia," "Paper Moon"), who, according to Mr. Wang, "tore his hair out for many years" trying to distill this ambitious odyssey into a movie. More important, perhaps, the visual extremes that Beverly Hills and its environs so obligingly offer, of mindless luxury and sunbleached squalor, become a kind of mirror of Adele herself and of the complicated feelings Ann has for her exhilarating, appalling, grasping, irrepressible mother.

In her trailer between scenes, Ms. Sarandon, who has played decidely more saintly mothers in "Lorenzo's Oil" and the forthcoming "Stepmom," is submitting to a touch-up manicure. "I'm the worst on nails," she says, "but we decided Adele has to have nail polish." Dressed in skintight Chinese brocade for a scene in which she has a date with a dentist, Ms. Sarandon shows off the fresh coat of red, a color she describes as "kind of fabulous." It's name, appropriately enough for a character whose efforts to find a husband are as doomed as her outfits, is Broken Heart.

"She's not very likable," Ms. Sarandon says of her character, "but she's very funny, so it's a challenge to find a way to get away with that and make it not too grating." She has just shot a dozen or more takes of a giddy Adele literally dragging her daughter out of bed so she can share the news of this latest prospect who is "not just a dentist, he's writing a screenplay." Ms. Sarandon laughs, only slightly ruefully. "I said to Natalie, I can see the reviews saying, 'Sarandon's chewing up the scenery and Portman's giving the film it's heart.' "

In the scene they've just finished, the 17-year-old Ms. Portman, who plays the young queen in George Lucas's forthcoming "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace," gives so convincing a portrayal of teen-age inertia that her immovable bulk sometimes seems to dwarf Ms. Sarandon. (In fact, the two are both slight and small-boned.) "It's a very interesting, almost a Thelma and Louise kind of balance," Ms. Sarandon says, referring to her 1991 female buddy movie..

It's seemingly not that big a step from the nonstop, slightly dotty charm that Ms. Sarandon displays off camera to Adele's hectic enthusiasms for themed outfits or ice cream at all hours. But when Ms. Simpson's novel was first published, reviewers found the mother a good deal more frightening.

Vogue magazine described Adele as "truly a monster," though "human and vulnerable." Her effect on her child had its chilling aspects as well, revealed in the girl's callously manipulative sexual encounters with a boyfriend. That aspect of the story, too, has been softened in the film.

Spending the time between takes in her trailer with "Man's Search for Meaning," by Viktor E. Frankel (it's on her high school summer reading list), Ms. Portman recalls that when Mr. Wang first offered her the role -- at the time she was playing Anne Frank on Broadway -- she turned it down. "I said: 'It's really great and I would love to work with you, but there was a sex scene in the script. I'm not ready to do that on screen.' So he looked at other girls, and then he came back and said: 'You know what we're going to do? We're going to write it out of the movie.' So I said, 'Great.' "

Reached by phone, Mona Simpson, who is teaching at Bard College in Avondale-on -Hudson, N.Y., said she was not really aware of the film's details. "I saw them shoot one of the opening scenes -- it's a view of Beverly Hills seen from a hill in East L.A. Of course, what you're really seeing is Century City. Beverly Hills is rather lowlying. It doesn't stand out. But Wayne's visual style is so dark and interior, I can't imagine the movie being too light."

It is lunchtime, and the sound stage is largely deserted. Mr. Wang's deliberate, soft-spoken manner reinforces the scholarly impression of his looks. When he was given the script of "Anywhere but Here," he says, "I found it funny.

"I was kind of tormented by it and also very moved."

Others involved with the film are quick to speak of their own mothers in explaining their interest, but for Mr. Wang the link was paternal. "My father was kind of nutty, doing a lot of different kind of investments that were really dangerous," he says. "You know, the Chinese family always has a big bowl where they fill up the rice, and as a kid, when that rice goes almost down to the bottom, you start to worry because that's what you eat every day. That's what reminds me of Adele -- the way she's sometimes irresponsible with her daughter."

Mr. Wang was looking to do a studio film after his independent (and disappointingly received) "Chinese Box," a film starring Jeremy Irons that opened earlier this year. Set in Hong Kong, where he was born after his parents fled the communist takeover of China, "Chinese Box" focused on the hand-over of the former British colony to the Chinese government. That movie was one Mr. Wang says he felt he had to do. In a way, however, he finds "Anywhere but Here" more of a challenge. "I have to make these characters truthful and yet really accessible -- and not fall into the trap of making it too easily entertaining." As for Ms. Sarandon, Mr. Wang says, "she's very much a mother to the crew, and to me, too." Her first day on the set, she came bearing plastic beads for everyone that she'd found in Chinatown. They featured a dangling statue of Buddha that glowed in the dark. Mr. Wang's laugh is soaring, high-pitched, utterly infectious. "When I first started making movies, I would just cast people to be themselves," he says. "But then I found actors were so wonderful. They bring so much, and yet their own personality is melded in there. If you use them right, you can use some of that, too."

His cast proves him right. Back in the alley, Ms. Sarandon tries a new bit of business while unloading the Mercedes, bumping the laden Ms. Portman (who reacts with a vivid mixture of irritation and bemusement) in an attempt to reach the apartment first. The contrast of their movements -- darting versus deliberate, eager versus aggrieved -- and their laughable, painful, intertwining dance is "Anywhere but Here" in miniature.

In the end, novel and film agree. However much we reach for labels -- this parent is a good mother; that one unfit -- the true face of our most intimate relationships, like that of the city encircling this alley, is a far more complicated melange, changing street by street and moment to moment -- even as we look.