Set Me Free.

Set Me Free * Written and directed by Lea Pool * Starring Karine Vanasse, Nancy Huston, Charlotte Christeler, and Miki Manojlovic * Artistic License/Merchant Ivory

If adolescent boys aspire to be Mike Tyson or Dennis Rodman, why can't adolescent girls model themselves after prostitutes who smoke too much, play too much, and read too much Sartre?

Hanna, the 13-year-old heroine of the 1963-set memory piece Set Me Free, has a thing for Anna Karina's hooker Nana in Godard's My Life to Live. As played by the disarming Karine Vanasse, Hanna studies her--tries to walk like her, hold a cigarette like her, and even paints her face and picks up a trick like her. What's more, she develops crushes on women who project that Karina je ne sais quoi--an elegant schoolteacher (Nancy Huston) and a hormonally precocious schoolmate named Laura (Charlotte Christeler) who pounces on Hanna faster than you can say Maedchen in Uniform.

The nature and intensity of Harem's sexual awakening catches us a little off-guard in Pool's invigorating film, if only because there is so much else happening on this girl's radar screen. There is the borderline incestuous affection shared between Hanna and her terminally adorable older brother, Paul (Alexandre Merineau). And she is always having to nm interference between her father (Miki Manojlovic), a habitually unemployed Polish-Jewish poet, and her overworked seamstress mother (Pascale Bussieres).

Given the extent, of unhappiness and uncertainty surrounding young Hanna, Pool has fashioned a film that floats around her with a buoyancy and an abiding faith in the basic goodness of humanity that carries us over the bumpy spots along with its heroine. Characteristically, Pool has Hanna's volatile father present her with a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, whose optimism provides a life-affirming alternative to the fatalistic existentialism offered her by the Godard film.

Director-writer Pool is aptly named: She has a deep wellspring of patience for all of her characters (with the possible exception of a Jew-baiting schoolgirl) and a feel for the sorrowful push and pull of adult relations reminiscent of Diane Kurys's Entre Nous. And she has a very watchable star in Vanasse, a fresh-faced French-Canadian actress with a whiff of Jean Seberg about her. Those of you who scram for the exit at the first sign of the closing titles are advised to hang in while Vanasse serenades us with a plaintive "Sidonie" on the acoustic guitar. It's worth the price of admission.

Stuart is film critic and senior film Writer at Newsday.