`ALICE:' THE LOGIC OF TRUE LOVE.

Byline: A.O. Scott The New York Times

Andre Techine is the most novelistic of filmmakers, by which I don't mean that he stints on the visual aspects of his craft. On the contrary, his new film, ``Alice and Martin,'' like his masterpieces ``Ma Saison Preferee'' and the scandalously underrated ``Wild Reeds,'' is full of gorgeous photography, swift, elegant editing and meticulously composed scenes. Techine's camera captures the dazzling yellow of a meadow in southern France, the deep grays of Paris at night and the rhythms of the sea beating against russet rocks on the Spanish coast.

But none of this beauty is thrown onto the screen for its own sake; it seems to occur almost as a byproduct of Techine's fanatical concentration on the fine grain of his story. Like a good novel, and like Techine's previous films, the story resists summary. While it glances at some interestingly knotty themes - the tension between bohemian asceticism and consumer culture, the atavistic pull of family history, the self-destructive logic of true love - ``Alice and Martin'' proceeds almost entirely without speech-making or exposition. You have to work a bit, especially at first, to figure out the relationships among the characters, to say nothing of their feelings and motives, but your attention is rewarded by a film of surprising depth and a few deep surprises.

The first scenes play out almost breathlessly, as 10-year-old Martin (Jeremy Kreikenmayer), who lives happily with his mother, a hairdresser, and her boyfriend, a taxi driver, is abruptly sent to live on a gloomy estate ruled by his truculent father (Pierre Maguelon), a local industrialist. All this information is imparted almost in passing, as if any concession to the audience would break the spell of realism. In due course, we learn that Martin is illegitimate and that he has three older halrothers.

Abruptly it's 10 years later, and Martin, grown into a handsome, delicate young man (Alexis Loret), bursts from his father's house to roam the countryside until he is caught stealing a farmer's eggs, after which he drifts to Paris, where he encounters his brother Benjamin's roommate, Alice (Juliette Binoche).

One of this film's most ingenious and unnerving effects is the way it confounds our sense of time: both chronology and duration. Just when you think you've mastered the relationships among the characters and begun to infer where the story is going, the narrative swerves back into the past with whiplash-inducing suddenness. Similarly, and even more unnervingly, it's often impossible to tell whether a sequence of scenes unfolds over days, weeks or months.

This dislocation is deliberate, and it effectively communicates the emotional rhythms of the characters' lives. One of Techine's skills is his ability to sustain a sense of unpredictability without sacrificing coherence. But although ``Alice and Martin'' is always engrossing, it moves at once too quickly and too slowly. During the film's last section, which follows Alice's solitary journey to Martin's hometown in search of his family secrets, much of the earlier intensity dissipates.

But too much complication is, in this case, too much of a good thing, and the proliferation of characters allows us to see performances we might otherwise have missed, notably Carmen Maura as Martin's stepmother, and Mathieu Amalric as Benjamin. ``Alice and Martin'' is a richly populated, observant film that suffers, forgivably, from an excess of curiosity about the world it depicts - a surfeit of generosity, intelligence and art.

The facts

--The film: ``Alice and Martin'' (R; sexually suggestive and obliquely violent scenes).

--The stars: Juliette Binoche, Alexis Loret.

--Behind the scenes: Directed by Andre Techine. Written (in French, with English subtitles) by Techine and Gilles Taurand, with the collaboration of Olivier Assayas. Produced by Alain Sarde. Released by USA Films.

--Running time: Two hours, three minutes.

--Playing: Landmark Checchi Gori Theatre, Beverly Hills.

--Our rating: Three stars

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Alexis Loret and Juliette Binoche star in the Andre Techine drama ``Alice and Martin.''