Water Drops On Burning Rocks
Filmhouse ***

It looked for a while as if young French director François Ozon would never live up to the provocative promise of his early shorts. His debut feature, the John Waters tribute Sitcom, was strictly subversion-by-numbers, and his follow-up, Criminal Lovers, was a directionless essay in fairy-tale nightmare.

But Ozon certainly doesn't waste time licking his wounds. Already on his third feature, he has taken a new tack and adapted Water Drops On Burning Rocks, a stage play that Rainer Werner Fassbinder wrote at the age of 19.

Ozon wisely heightens rather than hides the film's theatrical origins. The drama, set in the apartment of middle-aged bisexual roué Leopold, is played out on a series of tightly-framed sets, decorated in a glumly kitsch style that may well be an accurate evocation of whatever passed as chic in 70s bourgeois Bavaria. The claustrophobic mood is unmistakably close to Fassbinder, but has an edge of parody that is strictly Ozon's, as in the scene where the four characters burst into a ludicrous but dapper disco routine.

Ozon's casting makes the film more skittishly sexy than Fassbinder would have done: Malik Zidi and Ludivine Seigner make a doe-eyed ingenue couple, and Anna Thomson is a disturbingly fragile faded vamp. The real discovery, however, is Bernard Giraudeau, for many years a mainstream tough guy lead, now weathered enough to play Leopold as a suavely predatory lounge lizard in tweeds and polo-neck.

This acidic essay on sexual manipulation bodes well for Ozon's new direction, and if he continues to follow Fassbinder's industrious example, it won't be long before we see where that leads.

At the Filmhouse (0131-228 2688) tonight.