Which is unfair for many reasons--not the least of which is that The Loss of Sexual Innocence can get megaplex bookings because it's hooked up with a name distributor, Sony Classics, while better movies drift around unnoticed like lost planes without a runway. And it's clear that the only reason a name distributor picked this up is because it came from a name director, Mike Figgis; had a couple of mid-level stars, Julian Sands and Saffron Burrows; and had enough nudity to make it marginally sellable. Even as pretentious as the title is--it reeks of nickel-beer night at a poetry slam--it'll at least prick up your ears on MovieFone. But that's what makes the whole thing so frustrating: seeing art-movie distribution governed by the same decrepit considerations that clog the megaplexes.

The Loss of Sexual Innocence seems meant as an emptying of writer-director Figgis' notebook, a grab-bag of story fragments, images, and dream sequences presented as the jumbled thoughts and memories of a British filmmaker (Sands). That the movie starts off without a plot is its most striking feature--the mood of languid disconnection and erotic anticipation is initially tantalizing, and Benoit Delhomme's sepia-toned camerawork is impressive. However, after a series of self-contained tidbits that are less notebook entries than wastebasket scraps, the movie eventually whittles down to parallel (awful) storylines: Sands' venture into unspoiled Africa with a film crew, and Adam and Eve's movement through paradise toward original sin.

Did I mention the twins separated by nuns? The dream sequence in which Sands' wife finishes the ironing in one room and commences stripping onstage to a jazz combo in the next? The Nazis with snarling dogs who chase Adam and Eve into the arms of paparazzi beneath a giant neon cross? Each squiggle is so vapid and sophomoric in itself that you don't care about finding connections between them--the opposite effect of a difficult, deliberately mystifying work like Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique (a likely influence), whose patterns and themes resonate more each time you watch it. By contrast, Figgis' ideas tend to boil down to fortune-cookie stuffers like "nature good, man evil."