Visions of a Dangerous and Beautiful World (Published 2005)

Opens today in New York. Directed by Sébastien Lifshitz In French, with English subtitles Not rated, 93 minutes

From its opening scene, in which Antony, the blond, androgynous singer from Antony and the Johnsons performs "I Fell in Love With a Dead Boy" in a haunted, shivering half-falsetto before a rapt audience, "Wild Side" sustains a mood of extravagant alienation and melancholy. The French film, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz from a screenplay by Stéphane Bouquet, observes the world through the eyes of Stéphanie (Stéphanie Michelini), a (pre-operative) transsexual prostitute who works the streets, bars and discos of Paris.

She lives with Jamel, a 30-year-old bisexual North African hustler who has fled the dismal housing project where he grew up. Graphic scenes show them separately plying their trade with demanding customers in bleak, joyless settings.

When Stéphanie is summoned to her childhood home in northern France by her dying mother, Liliane (Josiane Storelu), after being away for 17 years, she is flooded with memories of playing games of dress-up with her sister in the fields and of being dandled by her father. In those days, she was Pierre. And as she gently spoon-feeds soup to Liliane, to whom she bears a remarkable resemblance, she confronts her mother's intractable disapproval of what she has made of her life.

Stéphanie has already met Mikhail, a dishwasher and an illegal immigrant from Russia, who falls in love with her. With Jamel, the three become a ménage à trois, clinging to one another as a sexually connected alternative family. When she visits her mother, they join her.

"Wild Side" pointedly avoids overt psychologizing to portray Stéphanie, Jamel and Mikhail as romantic outsiders, beautiful, bruised lost souls who have found tentative comfort in one another. The cinematography by Agnès Godard, the longtime collaborator of Claire Denis, achieves the same breathtaking blend of sensuality, formal elegance and surreal detail she brought to Ms. Denis's masterpiece "Beau Travail."

Whether the camera is trained on the human body, the architecture of Paris, the fields of northern France or dancers gyrating in a disco, the movie gives you the feeling of rediscovering the world, moment by moment, in a revelatory waking dream. It is a world of layered mysteries, primitive and seething with latent violence, but exquisitely beautiful.

As a piece of storytelling, though, "Wild Side" is too elliptical and poetically structured to cohere as more than an intense mood piece with social ramifications. The movie is so enraptured with its own romantic desolation that its narrative drive becomes sidetracked. STEPHEN HOLDEN