The Centre Of The World

Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) pays Florence (Molly Parker), a stripper, $10,000 to spend three days with him in Las Vegas. Her rules are that she must be paid cash in advance, no kissing on the mouth, no penetration and she will perform a sex show for him between 10pm and 2pm. It's Pretty Woman for an arthouse audience.

Let's get the bad stuff out of the way first. The back stories and the people acting in them are terrible. Richard is not a convincingly wealthy "computer guy". Having the character spout a couple of buzzwords so that he could be rich enough to pay $10,000 is nothing more than lazy and clumsy. His business partner (Jason McCabe Calacanis) might just as well have said, "He is rich. He works in computers. I hope you enjoy the film,"and left it at that. Terrible, terrible, terrible!

Florence's friend (Carla Gugino) is a little more convincing. It would be nice, just once, to see a film about strippers, or prostitutes, where the best friend isn't beaten up as either a cheap foretelling, or a reminder that the main character has never 'ad it so good. For a film with a fairly unoriginal premise, one would have hoped that moments like this could have been avoided.

It is testament to the strength of the film that the bad bits hardly matter. This is a brilliant piece of work, made so by the performances of, and interplay between, Sarsgaard and Parker. It's not a film about a rich computer whizkid and a stripper; it's not a film about Las Vegas; it's not even a film about sex, although there's plenty around; it's about watching two people and their relationship, whatever that might be. It's a film about loneliness and trying to find a connection somewhere, anywhere. It's a film, I suppose, about love, but not the easy love we see so often. It's about the complicated, bitter love of real life - and arthouse films! - where you don't quite know what you want, and probably wouldn't get it if you did. It's all there in the acting.

Wayne Wang directs just as brilliantly. He adopts a number of techniques and styles, but they're never showy and always make a necessary point about the nature of the characters. His handling of the sex scenes is realistic and appropriate. To call them explicit would be to miss the point: the sex isn't about sex, it's about the people having sex. To fully understand what they're thinking, what their attitudes are to their situation, you need to see their situation. It's shot and acted so well that it says what it wants, without suffering from any of the usual preconceptions, or attitudes, the audience might have towards sex. It's just what is happening.

The Centre Of The World is a film that touches you, not by virtue of being appropriate and relevant to your life, but by virtue of it being a true and believable rendition of other people's lives. Gloss over the bad moments and delight in what remains.