‘Killing Zoe’ (R)

Scuzzy, bloody and chicly nihilistic, "Killing Zoe" is the latest in boho brutalism. Written and directed by Roger Avary, the film is a virulent fandango that depicts crime as a form of haute decadence -- as if it were what fashion models do on their days off.

Set in the bowels of Paris among a demimonde of hipster toughs, this fashionably empty movie plays like a distillation of marijuana smoke and Peckinpah movies. Its hero is a safecracker named Zed (Eric Stoltz) who arrives in the City of Light looking jet-lagged and unwashed, which, as it turns out, is pretty much how he always looks. Where Zed has come from we never know, but in the cab on the way to his hotel his driver fixes him up with a "wife for the night." As a rule, Zed avoids regular girls, preferring instead the "honesty and sincerity" of prostitutes. But as Zoe (Julie Delpy) quickly informs him, she is not really a whore but an art student trying to make a little money on the side.

Whichever the case, Zed and the ethereal, gum-smacking Zoe quickly get down to business, and for some reason -- maybe it was the glow of F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" from the TV set -- the sex is almost good enough for the pair to begin picking out china patterns. The romance is short-lived, though, when the love nest is disrupted the next morning by Eric (Jean-Hugues Anglade), Zed's misogynistic partner in crime, who promptly tosses the bare-bottomed Zoe into the hall.

The title here is somewhat misleading, given that the only "killing" of Zoe takes place during this night of love. Eric's plan is to pull off a Bastille Day bank job, but Eric and his crew, a crapulous gang of junkies, are philosophically opposed to elaborate planning. As the group's mastermind puts it, "We go in, we take what we want, we leave."

The real preparation for the job takes place the night before in a rancid hole-in-the-wall where Eric and the boys listen to Dixieland jazz and fall into an orgy of booze and dope that carries over into the next day's business. Avary reserves his most creative filmmaking moves for this evening of debauchery, swinging his camera around in a euphoric frenzy and giving in so completely to his phantasmagoric impulses that a smashed Zed sees a parade of cartoon blue notes stream out of one musician's horn.

"Killing Zoe" comes out of the continuing partnership between its fledgling auteur and Quentin Tarantino, the creator of "Reservoir Dogs," who is listed here as executive producer and with whom Avary wrote the scripts for "True Romance" and for Tarantino's upcoming "Pulp Fiction." And like these other works (plus "Natural Born Killers," which grew out of Tarantino's original story), this one thrives on a sense of stylish excess that verges on the absurd. Nothing in "Killing Zoe" is the slightest bit believeable, nor is it intended to be. Instead of pulling from real-life experience, Avary -- and, for that matter, Tarantino, with whom he once worked in a video store -- create variations on a backlog of movie memories, building fantasies on fantasies.

As a result, "Killing Zoe" is substanceless but full of manic pop energy. With the gang still zonked, the heist itself seems like an extension of the previous night's revels. To say it goes badly is an understatement, but for Avary the fun is in seeing the whole scheme degenerate into a gory fiasco. By the end, the bank's marble floors are slick with blood, but the whole film is so rootless that you feel oddly untouched by the violence. For all its tough-guy posturing, "Killing Zoe" seems like a boy's plaything, the cinematic equivalent of pulling the wings off flies.

"Killing Zoe" is rated R and contains violence, nudity and adult language.