REVIEWED - MA MÈRE: TWO of the most uninhibited actors working in French cinema today are cast as mother and son in Ma Mère, based on a novel by Georges Bataille, the once-pious seminarian who went on to write scandalous books blending sex, spirituality and philosophy. The result is, inevitably, calculatedly provocative.

The Canary Islands provide the backdrop for this overheated melange of decadence and depravity. Fresh from his lascivious romps in Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, Louis Garrel plays Pierre, a sullen but ostensibly pious teen who arrives from school to spend the summer with his parents. Quite unperturbed by his father's death in a car accident, Pierre is taken under the wing of his mother, Hélène (Isabelle Huppert), the most hedonistic woman on the island.

Hélène enthusiastically sets about arranging Pierre's sexual initiation. She takes him for a night on the town with her pal, Rea (Joanna Preiss), who is feeling up Pierre and kissing Hélène even before they get out of the taxi. Out on the street later that night, and utterly oblivious to the passers-by, Hélène orders Rea to undress Pierre, and she watches approvingly as Rea seduces her son.

The implication is that the connection between Hélène and Pierre is Oedipal, although there's nothing complex about this or any other aspect of a movie intent on titillating and shocking the viewer. There's lesbianism, voyeurism, ménages a trois, sado-masochism, and Garrel urinating and masturbating for the camera.

Reserving his most tasteless stroke for the movie's resolution, director Christophe Honoré demonstrates his odd notion of irony as he runs the bouncy Turtles tune, Happy Together, over a feel-bad finale.