Exotica (1995)

Exotica (R) The key setting is a shimmery-dark strip club, where Christina (Mia Kirshner), an exquisite young woman with long, wavy dark hair, does table dances dressed as a Catholic school girl. The Canadian writer-director Atom Egoyan certainly knows how to exploit our attraction to sin. He lures us with jailbait naughtiness, with the passing suggestion that his hero (Bruce Greenwood) may have been involved in the murder of someone close to him. The odd thing about Exotica is that the more its intricate puzzle narrative yields its secrets, the less interesting the film becomes. In the end, the characters' ''dark'' compulsions are illusory-a shell game. Egoyan the bad-boy voyeur turns out to be a good-boy prude. B+ ( 267, March 24) -OG