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The Marquis de Sade has given French filmmakers the go-ahead to explore any sexual excess — as long as it is pleasureless, cerebral, and absurd. A good sense of humor will thus help in appreciating filmmaker and sometime children’s-book author Christophe Honoré’s adaptation of Sade wanna-be Georges Bataille’s 1966 novella about an Oedipus complex gone berserk. Devout youth Pierre (Louis Garrel) responds badly when his dissolute father dies; he masturbates on the old man’s porn collection and then, fraught with guilt and grief, pees on it. Then there’s his mom, Hélène (Isabelle Huppert, ranging from icy ennui to icy disdain), who’s determined to initiate him into the world of depravity through surrogates like Réa (Joana Preiss), who introduces herself to Pierre by inserting her finger into his anus, and with such observations as "The pleasure only begins when the worm is in the fruit." But these Story of O–like high jinks merely delay the inevitable mother-and-child reunion, which involves champagne, an exacto knife, more masturbation, and a visit from the EMTs. Is sex really this dumb? Louis Malle had a better take on the same theme with Le souffle au cœur/Murmur of the Heart.