AIDS DRAMA `TOUCH ME' NOT SUNK BY ITS TROUBLES.

Byline: Bob Strauss Daily News Film Critic

Although it never overcomes a kind of narrative ungainliness, ``Touch Me'' does get better as it goes along.

One wishes the same for its heroine. Bridgette (Amanda Peet) is an aspiring actress who makes ends meet teaching some kind of yogaerobics at a Marina del Rey fitness club. Before you can say sexual harassment, she's happily hit on by the club's playboy manager Adam (Michael Vartan), whose father owns the place.

Quickly recognizing that they share a similarly high PSI rate of air in their heads, the attractive kids are well on the road to brainless bliss when a bump in the form of Bridgette's high school boyfriend informs her that he's dying of AIDS.

Sure enough, she tests positive for HIV. Bad news for Bridgette and Adam - but encouraging for viewers. Both the acting and the script, by director H. Gordon Boos and producer Greg H. Sims, get better as the story grows darker, personal stakes rise and serious thoughts have to, finally, be thought and dealt with.

``Touch Me'' maintains an air of low-budget amateurism to the end. Boos exhibits no sense of pacing, overloads the thing with stereotyped characters (an oversensitive AIDS support worker played by Greg Louganis, a self-destructive little brother for Adam, an earthy life force in the form of a dying-young African-American mother, etc.) and, when one scene would do the trick, takes three to make the same obvious point.

But Boos also has a knack for quietly, patiently building depth and complexity into apparently shallow lives. ``Touch Me'' may, for the most part, be a TV disease movie with a little extra sex. But it also shows us two people dealing, in very specific, human ways, with a devastating problem that's as hard to comprehend as their nourishing need for one another.

THE FACTS

The film: ``Touch Me'' (NR; language, nudity, sex, drug use).

The stars: Amanda Peet, Michael Vartan, Peter Facinelli, Kari Wuhrer, Erica Gimpel, Greg Louganis.

Behind the scenes: Directed by H. Gordon Boos. Written by Boos and Greg H. Sims. Produced by Sims and David Scott Rubin. Released by Devin Entertainment.

Running time: One hour, 47 minutes.

Playing: Landmark's NuWilshire, Santa Monica.

Our rating: Two and one half stars.

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Photo

Photo: An HIV diagnosis complicates the lives of health-club workers Bridgette (Amanda Peet) and Adam (Michael Vartan) in the independent film ``Touch Me.''