ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔ

Indie favourite Todd Solondz's latest presents the strange tale of 13-year-old Aviva Victor. After a botched abortion leaves her sterile, Aviva flees her family and ends up at a Christian commune. The twist - intended, perhaps, to pep up such depressing subject matter - is that Solondz keeps switching actors in the lead role. Over the course of the film, the teenage heroine is portrayed by players white and black, male and female and, in the penultimate episode, by the fortysomething Jennifer Jason Leigh.

As experiments go, it simply doesn't work. Bad writing undermines the satire, and the gimmick casting proves a curiously distancing device: tellingly, Leigh plays Aviva with much the same sulky indifference as anybody else. Worse still is that Solondz, whose previous Happiness put out similar mixed messages, never convinces us any of this is as amusing as he seems to think it is. It's hard to warm to a filmmaker who sets Aviva's rape to a grossly perky orchestral score and then keeps directing comic pauses into essentially tragic material.

"MISFORTUNE RAINS DOWN UPON THE FRAIL AND THE WEAK"

Consequently, anything approaching real life here is presented in the most misjudged of ways. Chuckle as a sniper accidentally shoots an abortionist's young daughter! Guffaw as cousin Mark is exposed as a child molester! And split your sides as misfortune rains down upon the frail and the weak! For a filmmaker supposedly aligning himself with the freaks and geeks of this world, Solondz appears dead set on making bullies of us all.