Eight-year-old Julien (Thibault Verhaeghe) receives a metal can from his cancer-ridden mother (Emmanuelle Grönvold) and uses it to engage eight-year-old Sophie (Joséphine Lebas-Joly) in a game of "dares," the successful completion of each obnoxious challenge (piss on the rug in the principal's office, I dare you) results in the transfer of the tin grail. Their lives are otherwise miserable, what with Julien the child of a whimsically abusive, non-communicative father (Gérard Watkins) and a soon-to-be-dead mother and Sophie being Polish and all, and their little game becomes all-consuming and, ultimately, fatal. The two children play doctor, sleep in the same bed together, then ten years pass in one edit and Julien (Guillaume Canet) and Sophie (Marion Cotillard), still in that same bed, presumably never having consummated their creepy love affair, suddenly have it dawn on them that after sailing oceans on their exclusive ship of fools, they were meant for each other.

I remember an article in THE ONION about a man arrested for exhibiting romantic comedy behaviours, and to an extent Love Me If You Dare ("Child's Play" is its French title and more apt for more than one reason) can be read as tongue-in-cheek excoriation of the Meg Ryan/Julia Roberts school of sanctifying bad behaviour. But there's a point for me at which a film trying to comment on a malady by embodying that malady becomes, simply, the malady itself. Does Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo comment on human cruelty or stand as an example of human cruelty? Is Nacho Cerdá's Aftermath about exploitation, or is it exploitation? How you answer questions like that has a lot to do with how much you laugh knowingly at or with Love Me If You Dare--or how much you recognize the difference between Pasolini's dangerous art and Samuell's facile pornography.-Walter Chaw