Edition: U.S. / Global

FILM REVIEW; Contracting for a Sexual Fantasy, With No Addendum for Emotions

Published: April 18, 2001

In ''The Center of the World'' Richard, a lonely young Internet entrepreneur, skips out on his company's big initial public offering and pays a stripper named Florence $10,000 to fly to Las Vegas with him for a few nights of kinky indulgence. It's not as much fun as it sounds for the participants or for the audience. Nor is it meant to be.

The movie, directed by Wayne Wang from a script he wrote with the novelists Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt under the collective pseudonym Ellen Benjamin Wong, is one of those films, often considered a French specialty, that takes sex so seriously as to make you wonder why anyone would bother with it.

According to their agreement, Richard and Florence's encounters take place from 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. Four hours is a long time. Most of what they do is left to the imagination of the audience, which is probably more fertile than those of the filmmakers. On the first night Florence marches through the door that separates their hotel rooms in a very short, very tight blue dress, and performs what appears to be elementary yoga poses in front of the slack-jawed Richard.

Later she asks him to tell her his secret fantasy, and he whispers something in her ear. ''The Chinese call that fire and ice,'' she knowingly informs him. (Tourists take note.) It involves an ice cube and a mouthful of tabasco sauce. But the movie itself never reaches such extremities of sensation, alternating instead between a low-grade fever and a damp chill.

Shot in the close, stripped-down digital video style that is quickly becoming a sign of high aesthetic pretension, ''The Center of the World'' sells itself as an unflinching study in erotic obsession, a somber look at how the cash nexus threatens human relationships and emotions. From its opening shots of the Las Vegas skyline's counterfeit wonders -- replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty and the Sphinx -- to its climactic scene of sexual disconnection, the film throws up gusts of philosophical portent.

In a culture apparently defined by lap dancing, ersatz architectural sublimity and the virtual contact of cyberspace, how do we know what is real? The question is not without interest, but it is not always difficult to answer. ''The Center of the World,'' for example, is as phony as can be. ''You want real? I'll give you real,'' Florence taunts Richard, after he humiliates himself in an attempt to humiliate her.

But even at their sweatiest and most naked, the characters never exhale the humidity of real life. Instead they breathe the thin, parched air of an abstract, literary point of view that can only touch life by condescending to it. Mr. Wang and Mr. Auster do for desire what they did for Brooklyn in ''Smoke,'' their first collaboration: they turn it into an intellectual construct as bleached of emotion as the new film's flashback sequences are drained of color, and then paint on the washed-out hues of their world-weary sentimentality.

Peter Sarsgaard and Molly Parker, who play Richard and Florence in various postures and states of undress, deserve medals for bravery in the service of an unworthy cause. Their performances, and Carla Gugino's brief appearance as Florence's friend, provide a rough grain of authenticity, capturing the blunted affect and aimless neediness of people in their 20's struggling to navigate a world of material abundance and impoverished emotional possibility. Mr. Sarsgaard, with his unruly hair and sweet, boyish demeanor, makes Richard seem like a genuinely nice guy, too innocent to grasp the sleaziness of his bargain with Florence.

Ms. Parker, guarded and angular, has a harder time supplying her character with credible motives and responses. Florence starts out in confident control of the situation, agreeing to accompany Richard to Las Vegas only if he agrees to a list of conditions, including no penetration, no discussion of feelings and no kissing on the mouth.

As she breaks these rules, half on impulse and half by design, it is hard to know whether she is starting to feel something for Richard or testing her ability to simulate and suppress feeling. In the hands of a director like Eric Rohmer, Florence's actions might take on a tantalizing ambiguity, but the script and Mr. Wang's aggressively flat filmmaking style reduce her to an incoherent fantasy of female sexual capriciousness.

The deeper problem with ''The Center of the World'' lies with Richard, who falls in love with the woman whose favors he has purchased and expects her to reciprocate, as though he were inhabiting a Dogma 95 remake of ''Pretty Woman.'' At least the original was shameless in its cynical romanticism.

The only way Mr. Wang's movie can be the brave act of truth telling it wants to be -- the only way Richard's ultimate disillusionment can have any force -- is if the audience buys into Richard's callow self-deception. But why should we, when the filmmakers don't even bother to fake it convincingly? The self-consciously rough, low-budget surface of ''The Center of the World'' can't disguise the slick cheapness at its heart.


Directed by Wayne Wang; written by Ellen Benjamin Wong, based on a story by Mr. Wang, Miranda July, Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt; director of photography, Mauro Fiore; edited by Lee Percy; production designer, Donald Graham Burt; produced by Peter Newman and Mr. Wang; released by Artisan Entertainment. At the Angelika Film Center, Mercer and Houston Streets, Greenwich Village. Running time: 86 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Peter Sarsgaard (Richard Longman), Molly Parker (Florence) and Carla Gugino (Jerri).

Photo: Peter Sarsgaard and Molly Parker in ''The Center of the World.'' (Meila Penn/Artisan Entertainment)