Boxing Helena.

To anyone interested in sampling the rottenest apple from the bottom of the cinematic barrel, let me commend Jennifer Chambers Lynch's Boxing Helena, a film acclaimed at the Sundance Festival, success at which is a guarantee of mediocrity or worse. Kim Basinger backed out of the lead, causing her to incur a ruinous seven-million-dollar lawsuit. Believe me, though: every lost penny of it was well spent. Miss Lynch, whose sole claim to fame is her vastly overrated father, the director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, manages to go Papa David one better in tastelessness, incompetence, and benightedness, unaware even that the accent in "Helena" does not go on the penult, for which offense alone I'd banish her to St. Helena.

Miss Lynch wrote the screenplay from a story by Philippe Caland, of whom I have never heard, and sincerely hope never to hear again. This is the tale of Dr. Nick Cavanaugh (an unlikely name for a surgeon), who is effete, namby-pamby, and supremely masochistic (an unlikely personality for a surgeon). He falls abjectly in love with the gorgeous, haughty Helena, who, after an unsuccessful initial date, keeps icily rejecting him, as well she, or anyone, might, given the mewling pest he is. When, trying to escape his crawling advances, Helena is hit by a car, Nick performs an operation on her in his private mansion that leaves her legless. Now in a wheelchair and his love prisoner, Helena can still verbally cut off Nick's attempts to wriggle into her affection: so the worthy sawbones operates away her remaining limbs, turning her into a nice little torso to feed, cosset, and blissfully toy with.

There are only two ways to make such a film. Either you have to be a tormented genius like Luis Bunuel, and turn out a dark, Sadean phantasmagoria, or you must be a clever outright pornographer. Not having the talent for the one, or the stomach for the other, Jennifer Lynch proffers unerotic titillation, sexless nastiness, mindless temerity. But also ultimate cravenness: the picture ends with a huge copout, denying all that went before. Reviewing it in the Times, Janet Maslin finds the movie not contemptuous of women, because "even without her arms, the cruel, beautiful Helena manages to hold all the cards." Miss Lynch displays "talent" and "control" as "no visible bloodshed is involved in transforming Helena from a cursing, prop-throwing hellion to the enshrined beauty Nick ... wanted her to be." Just think what Shylock could have done with Nick's talent for bloodless surgery!

Divesting Helena of her limbs is, for Miss Maslin, a therapeutic act, cutting short her short-temperedness. The "engrossing" Miss Lynch, it seems, exhibits an "odd but coherent imagination," which may be true if wall-towall nonsense is construed as coherence. Miss Maslin's main reservation concerns Nick's neglectful mother, the cause of his subsequent troubles, being played by "an actress who looks like a Playboy bunny." If only Nick's father had deboned this bunny, she might have lost her Playboy look and become a nice domestic plaything.

Miss Lynch, I fear, is no cuttingedge director. She has cast two conspicuous no-talents in the leads. Julian Sands is a horse-faced British actor with a shoulder-length blond mane, whose voice drips with castor oil and whose manner is so mawkish and languid that the most pacific spectator would want to kick him. Sherilyn Fenn, the celebrated corpse from Twin Peaks, is so devoid of all ability that you wonder whether some previous surgeon might not have removed her cortex. In a meaningless supporting role, Art Garfunlde is his customary egregious self, but even such good actors as Bill Paxton and Kurtwood Smith are dragged down to Art's artistic level. And compared to Miss Lynch as screenwriter, Jackie Collins reads like Colette.

As I watched scene after flatfooted scene (is there no surgery for fallen arches?), I was reminded of one of Karl Kraus's apothegms: "Why do some people write? Because they don't have enough character not to write." The same applies to certain filmmakers, especially if they have powerful filmmaker fathers.