The trouble comes in part from the movie’s contemporary framing device, as Cecile de France (playing world’s hottest French Lieutenant woman) pages her way through an idealistic young soldier’s journal, hoping to uncover the key to an unsolved murder inside. Instead, she finds the stern Colonel who recruited the diary’s author to oversee torture sessions with suspected Algerian rebels. The flashbacks unfold in black and white — whether a nod to the far superior Battle of Algiers or a cost-cutting device, I can only guess, but the decision is as misguided as those indecipherable moving-camera shots.

With Olivier Gourmet (a choice of co-producers the Dardennes brothers, no doubt) as the jaded officer and Robinson Stévenin (a slightly brutish variation on Cillian Murphy’s pretty-boy looks, so much so that he too was able to play a transvestite in a movie called Transfixed) as the by-the-books romantic, this is “you can’t handle the truth” material, as spun in the decidedly non-Hollywood fashion of Franco-Belgian neo-realism. It’ll open your eyes and appeal to your inner altruist, offering an incendiary allegory for Abu Ghraib atrocities along the way, but, like a half-assed Holocaust movie, undermines the worthiness of the cause through sheer clumsiness.

Screened: April 21 @ the Directors Guild Theater, part of the City of Lights - City of Angels (COLCOA) film festival, introducing Angelenos to the best of contemporary French cinema. This was the only screening in the fest that seemed under-attended, no doubt a combination of the subject matter and the Saturday afternoon showtime.