'CENTER'S' COMPLEX JOURNEY PROMOTING RACY FILM A CHALLENGE.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

How do you make something hot and cold at the same time?

It seems like an impossibility, especially for a filmmaker. But that was the paradox confronting director Wayne Wang with ``The Center of the World,'' which opened Friday. The unrated film, about a computer whiz (Richard, played by Peter Sarsgaard) who hires a stripper (Florence, played by Molly Parker) for three days of sex in Las Vegas, has already generated heat because its original ads were rejected by some newspapers.

Wang says the inspiration for the ads came from the same place as part of his inspiration for the film, an 1866 painting by French artist Gustave Courbet, titled ``The Origin of the World,'' that hangs in the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. A reference to both sex and birth, the painting is of a reclining woman's nude body from her midriff to her thighs.

While Courbet's highly regarded work is ``upfront'' about its subject matter, Wang felt the ads were ``quite reserved, quite artistic and beautiful ... but still, that's too sexy for some people.''

A different ad with a side view was later accepted, but Wang called it ``a pity.''

As a director who has gone between indies like ``Smoke'' and ``Blue in the Face,'' and bigger-budget Hollywood films like ``The Joy Luck Club'' and ``Anywhere but Here,'' Wang knew that he would face a challenge marketing a $2.5 million film with an erotic subject shot entirely with digital cameras.

So he made two choices: first, not to get the film rated by the Motion Picture Association of America; and second, to create an interactive Web site, www.center-of-the-world.com, to promote it.

``I didn't go out to make a pornographic movie, but if you showed the film to the ratings board, it's an automatic NC-17,'' says Wang. ``Our movie, in a way, is more about sex than graphic sexuality or graphic nudity.''

As with the ads, he laments having to take this route, saying that the board needs something like a ``mature'' rating similar to television's, because NC-17 has a bad connotation.

Wang may be right about the rating the film would have received, but it's interesting to note that, except for a brief scene that is part of a real-life stripper's act, audiences are likely to see more graphic sexual depictions on pay-cable channels. HBO's successful reality-TV program ``G-String Divas,'' for instance, shows lap dances and strippers engaged in acts that are far beyond risque - this made all the more bizarre by the fact that the men frequenting the real clubs are letting themselves be photographed.

There is a voyeuristic quality to these TV shows, and Wang says that some of his film has a similar feel. This is enhanced by the digital-video look of the movie. And since audiences may associate video with surveillance cameras and porn, Wang tried to take advantage of that ``certain artificiality.''

As for the Web site, Wang took a different tack. He says he was impressed with how Artisan, which is releasing his film, had handled ``Requiem for a Dream,'' another unrated film promoted with a Web site. Not wanting to merely show clips, Wang helped create a site that he says played with the concept of the movie.

``I said, 'Let's do something that puts the person on the Internet in a similar kind of emotional feeling as Richard in the movie, which is to meet a stripper and have a lap dance.' ''

Visitors to the ``Center of the World'' Web site can click their way into the virtual dressing room of real-life porn star Alisha Klass and have an interactive encounter with her - we'll stop at that. (The site does warn that users must be 18 to enter.)

And this is where the hot and cold elements come in. Wang acknowledges that since porn hits account for some 50 percent of hits on the Internet, people looking for that kind of experience are likely to access the site. (Call that hot.)

But the film follows two people who are involved in a monetary (cold) relationship. That raises the question: What will people looking for an erotic art movie think when they see the film?

Wang says part of the reason he did the film was because of his experience hanging out with wealthy dot-com guys who, in turn, took him to strip clubs. It was the intersection of these two worlds that Wang found fascinating. He says the monied Internet men have the ``ability to compress time. They just want to go out and buy something or consume something very quickly.'' The strippers, on the other hand, he found had the ability to put up fire walls around their emotions. So even while in the midst of an erotic act, they are cut off from the world.

For the dot-com guys, their centers are computers. There's a scene in the movie in which Richard is seen surrounded by monitors: One has a video game on it, another has his work, a third is on a Web-cam site showing a shower at a sorority house. But his computers have cut him off from the world.

``I'm not saying that technology is not good,'' says Wang, ``but I think it does change the way these younger kids think about love, developing a relationship or even communication on any level. And if they don't start doing that, we're going to go into a lot of deep trouble.''

And that is at the heart of the film. Neither Richard nor Florence, because of their stunted emotional growth, has any idea of how to make things real - although they have impulses to do so - during their three days together.

So what is on the screen hardly generates the heat of, say, ``Last Tango in Paris,'' a film that Wang admires. Critics looking for a ``Tango'' experience have been disappointed. The Bernardo Bertolucci film was about a middle-age man dealing with his mortality through his sexuality.

While they possess erotic trappings, the sex scenes in ``World'' also have an emotionally distancing quality to them - the same way that the characters are alienated from their own emotions.

``It's not like '9 1/2 Weeks,' where you get titillated by the sex,'' says Wang. ``But I think the film is confrontational in its own way. My experience is that it's not comfortable and not enjoyable watching it, but I think you can't leave, either. You want to see it.''

Wang was expected to be at showings in Los Angeles this weekend (and later in New York City) to sign posters and check out who shows up. He's not sure who that will be, however.

``I'm curious,'' he says.

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Photo:

Director Wayne Wang, left, instructs actor Peter Sarsgaard on the set of ``The Center of the World,'' a movie about a lonely man who spends three days with a stripper.