Fleeting references to drug use are left unexplored, as is her decision to leave the pornography industry, to which she later returned. Nor is the impact of a gang rape that occurred after she picked up a stranger one night on the London Underground fully illuminated.

And when Ms. Quek speaks about herself, she is sometimes like a defiant little girl seeking to shock with frank talk, sometimes an overwrought punk as she puffs on a cigarette, sometimes a lost soul, sometimes a would-be artist creating life as a work of outrage, feminism and politics, or openly self-destructive as she cuts her arm repeatedly with a knife. ''You've just got to feel something,'' she says.

As for having sex with 251 men in 10 hours, she argues that it is no different from having sex with one man for 10 hours. ''I just wanted to explore my own sexuality,'' she says on an English television show. Her response to the possibility of contracting AIDS: ''I believe that sex is good enough to die for.''

About her career in pornography, she says she liked sex before, so why not do it for money? ''Sounds cool to me,'' she says.

But in one of the film's unexplored contradictions, it seems that her actions cannot be explained by a yearning for money. According to the film, she never collected the $10,000 that was to be her fee for her sexual marathon. And in one scene that is as bleakly funny as it is instructive and dismaying, she bargains with a filmmaker by proclaiming herself a great star, demands to be paid more than her female co-star and then rapidly reduces her price. And her messy little apartment gives no indication that her career has bought her psychological or environmental comfort.