`INNOCENCE' WRAPPED IN PRETENTIOUSNESS.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

As its title unintentionally warns us, ``The Loss of Sexual Innocence'' revels in pretentiousness. It's the kind of movie most people are talking about when they say art films are stupid. Don't expect critics to offer many counterarguments this time around.

A (gulp!) ``non-narrative'' piece written by its British director Mike Figgis, ``Innocence'' is, as far as can be ascertained, an impressionistic collection of thoughts and personal experiences the filmmaker perceives as formative. Many of these are related to, well, sex, coupled more often than not with some kind of growth trauma.

These free-form psyche doodles are interspersed with a self-conscious Adam and Eve parable (he's black, she's anorexic, and their Eden features a symbolic white horse as well as the usual serpent population). This is presumably meant to add philosophical significance to such scenes as a chubby kid who doesn't want to go to gym class getting beat up in his underwear. Then again, it could just be an excuse to show people naked.

Paradoxically, Figgis' genuine gifts for visual poetry and atmospheric intensity are showcased best when he works with a solid plotline (``Internal Affairs'') and richly developed characters (``Leaving Las Vegas''). A musician and composer who also creates his own film scores, he's going for a purely lyrical image flow in ``Sexual Innocence.'' But the best thing about that approach is that it limits dialogue to an absolute minimum, which must be a blessing. It's better to hear music, including some nice Chopin and Mozart piano sonatas, accompany the painfully artsy pictures than windy verbiage explaining the significance of it all.

The thing is, Figgis' gauzy eroticism isn't all that hard to decipher; it's just resoundingly trite when you do. His idea of revealing sexual fantasies runs along the lines of trains entering stations and negligees worn to jazz clubs. Figgis' visual metaphor for a tense marriage? Nic (Julian Sands) fondles his reluctant/receptive wife (Johanna Torrel) while she chops carrots in the kitchen.

There's something about twins (both Saffron Burrows, who was the posh girl in ``Circle of Friends''), separated at birth and encountering each other briefly, that plays like one of Krzysztof Kieslowski's afterthoughts. And as long as we're talking derivative, why does every shot in the second half of this supposedly personal film look like something out of a 35-year-old Italian movie?

We jump around from Nic's Kenyan childhood to his ardent adolescence (when he's played by Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) to his adult, Sands-played incarnation as some kind of filmmaker pursuing some kind of vision - and one of the Burrows twins - in the Tunisian desert. Between how that adventure dreadfully concludes and our pals Adam and Eve's fallen encounter with a ravenous pack of paparazzi, Figgis seems to believe the main culprit in our collective loss of sexual innocence is the camera.

After sitting through what he's shot here, you'll be inclined to agree.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The Loss of Sexual Innocence'' (R; nudity, language, sex, violence).

The stars: Julian Sands, Saffron Burrows, Stefano Dionisi, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Kelly MacDonald.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Mike Figgis. Produced by Figgis and Annie Stewart. Released by Sony Pictures Classics.

Running time: One hour, 41 minutes.

Playing: Sunset 5, West Hollywood; NuWilshire, Santa Monica; Playhouse 7, Pasadena.

Our rating: One and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: Saffron Burrows and Stefano Dionisi co-star in ``The Loss of Sexual Innocence.''