The Center of the World (2001)

With its flash-cut nudity and slathered-on mood music, the typical Hollywood sex scene has become a parody of itself, as made to specifications as a silicone implant. One goes into a movie like The Center of the World, shot on digital video by the scampish director Wayne Wang (Smoke), in the hopes of confronting a more risque eroticism — sex seen through a glass darkly. The actors, Molly Parker and Peter Sarsgaard, doff their clothes and go through the paces of a dance-of-the-seven-kinks psychodrama with an eagerness you'd be hard-pressed to find in marquee stars, but the movie itself is a tease.

In a kind of Last Tango With Pretty Woman, Richard (Sarsgaard), a repressed computer-whiz millionaire, offers $10,000 to Florence (Parker), a stripper with a thoughtful air, if she'll spend several days with him in Las Vegas. Their sexual activity, which precludes kissing and intercourse, is limited to four hours a night. Much complication ensues, but the movie hammers home the theme that Florence's vinyl-dominatrix allure is a manufactured image while remaining beholden to that image; it never fills in, at least coherently, who she is beneath. Parker simmers enticingly, and Sarsgaard, barely recognizable from Boys Don't Cry, could be a new screen type: the nerd hunk. They're talented performers, but The Center of the World is too arty by half, and it's jarring to confront an end credit that reveals that a movie this exhibitionistic about its own ''honesty'' used...body doubles.