Elles

Yet Elles has contemporary pertinence. As the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair showed, feminism hasn't significantly mellowed France's macho culture. And sexual predation on young women from Eastern Europe remains a timely topic.

Elles is provocative company, but it leaves us feeling hustled.

Titillation and tentative stabs at gender studies do not a cogent cri de coeur make. It's simply a provocation that's all hopped up with nowhere to go.

Elles has about half of a story stretched to feature length, and it manages to end just as a good story might have been kicking in. But that is often the way with foreign cinema: The Europeans know how to do sex, but we know how to do stories.

Szumowska provides lurid scenes of perverted sex, but she offers no new insight into the sordid world of prostitution and the dangers sex workers face. Nor does she flesh out Charlotte and Alicja. The result is a superficial and voyeuristic film.

It's entirely too much for co-writer/director Malgoska Szumowska to coherently flesh out in an hour and a half, especially with so much time dedicated just to the state of arousal.

The acting by Binoche and her two young co-stars is more nuanced than the film deserves. They bring a rich expressiveness and sense of complex inner life to their characters. It's the movie - and its placard-sized message - that is more two-dimensional.