BY ROB LOWMAN >Staff Writer

As an ambitious prostitute in Olivier Assayas' new thriller, Asia Argento is pale white - almost pasty - which is in sharp contrast to the black underthings that she parades around in during most of the movie and to the numerous tattoos on her body - most of which (if not all) are revealed. The world-weary Sandra is used to being used and using men, whom she hates and needs.

She comes alive (like a vamp or a vampire) during moments of seduction or when she's plotting an escape from her sordid life. Otherwise, she seems beaten down, vulnerable.

In the past, she's worked for a Paris-based investor, Miles (Michael Madsen), who had her sleep with competitors and then sexually got off on hearing their secrets. She returns to him just as he is about to sell off his company and as she tries to get money to invest in a Chinese nightclub. What follows involves drugs, sex, death, kinkiness and deals gone wrong.

Writer-director Assayas, a former French film critic, has concocted a plot that is dizzying and annoying at times, and it's hard to care about the characters in the shifting story. But B-movie veteran Argento's portrayal of Sandra is like watching a car careening down an incline. One moment she's lost and out of control, the next crafty and sly while every moment you expect splat.

Argento, though, is always weirdly interesting. In a sense, the actress, who no one will mistake for a Meryl Streep, is playing a bad actress (a seductress with a pout may fool a guy but never a woman), which somehow makes her seem all too human within the film's lunacy.

>Rob Lowman

BOARDING GATE

R: violence, sexual content, language and some drug material.

Playing: Laemmle's Sunset 5.