First Love, Last Rites.

*aYoung Jesse Peretz's debut feature (he has experience in music videos and shorts), First Love, Last Rites, is based on a short story by Ian McEwan. Right off, it suffers from the expansion of 10 pages to 93 minutes of film, and from the transposition from a grubby British harbor-town locale to the sun-drenched bayous of Louisiana. How many times can we watch these idyllic young lovers having delirious intercourse while listening to pop records, or growing lovey-dovey over shared cartons of Chinese food? And can we believe a Brooklyn youth transplanted to the bayou starting an ill-fated eel-fishing venture with his girlfriend's father? This kind of stretching might just barely work for someone else; for Peretz and his scenarist, David Ryan, it snaps back into their faces. Joey (Giovanni Ribisi) and Sissel (Natasha Gregson Wagner) are in the throes of their first affair -- nonstop sex play in their pink one-room shack on stilts. For a very long time it looks as if everything else, even the Chinese food Sissel adores, might be squeezed out of the picture. Eventually other elements do impinge: hunting and fishing with Sissel's father, who is having serious trouble with his wife, and noisy irruptions by Adrian, Sissel's bratty kid brother, bent on sabotaging his sister's sex. Further, a rat, noisily gnawing away inside the cabin's walls and eliciting symbolic fantasies in artily blurred images, as young love, for reasons equally blurry, starts turning sour. Pretty soon that aphrodisiac victrola is being kicked into silent submission by Joey, and Sissel boils her records into free-form blobs. Joey gets more involved with the eel traps, and Sissel gets a menial but liberating job at a sugar refinery. When Joey bludgeons the rat to death, the sweetly bucolic love affair comes unglued. Even his gallant offer, "We can buy new records, but you must promise not to boil them," falls on deaf ears. Perhaps the deepest penetration of Sissel's psyche occurs when Joey exclaims, "You're f -- ing loopy sometimes, you know that?" Tom Richmond's cinematography is suitably sensuous, and from Natasha Gregson Wagner we get a delectable young face and body, and a rather more winning performance than the script would seem to allow. Giovanni Ribisi (the medic in Saving Private Ryan) is a bit nerdy, but credible enough when he reluctantly dredges up stories from his Brooklyn childhood, or hangs out with the local fishermen who acts as a comic geek chorus. Robert John Burke is solid as the father, and Eli Marienthal a proper nuisance as little Adrian. But the film, lurching between desperate symbolism and amiable vacuity, goes nowhere. Slowly.