You're all alone except what goes on inside your body," the stubborn, uncompromising writer Adrien declares

in "Late August, Early September," Olivier Assayas' moody, graceful and deeply accomplished French feature on friendship, grief and shifting sexual relationships. The film's title evokes the works of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. Assayas, a 44-year-old former film critic, is drawn to themes of solitude and estrangement, exploring how physical passages of time mirror interior journeys of fate, opportunity, loss and renewal. The New Yorkbased independent Zeitgeist Films, which scored strong returns on Assayas' previous feature, the 1996 "Irma Vep," should elicit a healthy specialized following to this accessible, beautifully made work. Novelistically conceived with chapter headings (such as "Gabriel's Got Real Estate Problems"), its fragmented, impressionistic scenes punctuated by haunting fade-outs, the film is an elliptical consideration of the advancement and retreat of contemporary relationships. Assayas brilliantly binds the interrelated actions of four distinct individuals. Gabriel (Mathieu Almaric), a writer and editor, is gripped by doubt and uncertainty. His inchoate feelings are further aggravated by his compacted professional friendship with Adrien (Franois Cluzet), an admired though commercially negligible author. Gabriel has left the steady, faithful, compulsive Jenny (Jeanne Balibar) for the beautiful and brazenly self-possessed Anne (Virginie Ledoyen), a young fashion designer. From there Assayas daringly expands his scope rather than narrow his concerns. The offhanded, practically nonlinear expositional style yields a loose faction of friends, lovers and relatives that Assayas ruefully plays off and comments on. So the confident, refreshingly direct young high school girl (Mia Hansen-Love) that Adrien is secretly involved with is placed in counterpoint with the bruising experiences of the traumatized, emotionally scarred older woman left behind (played by Arsinee Khanjian, the wife of Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan). This is a film more about questions than answers, a work that remains closed to easy interpretations, although it's bracingly attuned to nuance and observation. All of its characters are concerned with the loss of stability and the urge for reinvention. In the last act, the death of one of the principals mediates a deeper examination of recovery and possibility, the consequences of loving unconditionally and the awakening of true feeling. The beauty is that Assayas achieves this through a concentrated and sophisticated visual design, eschewing sustained dramatic sequences in favor of shots, or fragments, of lives caught

nakedly, vulnerable and open. "Late August, Early September" is an explicitly sensual and deeply sensory film, alert to action and movement, consciousness and desire. Assayas has an astonishing facility for illustrating the emotional fluctuations of motion and feeling. Working with his excellent cinematographer Denis Lenoir, Assayas constantly frames his characters in stride, their arms, hands, faces, bodies moving in flow with their physical environment. Perspective and point of view remain constantly in flux, so shots begin inside cars, the interior of a train or other restricted spaces. Shot in Super 16mm, the film is visually somber, unfolding in a Paris drained of vibrancy or primary colors (with some striking exceptions, such as the red sweater Ledoyen appears in late in the film). The acting is uniformly sensational, bracketing the camerawork that is so incisive and free in capturing inflection and the subtleties of expression. Almaric, who played the confused academic of Arnaud Desplechin's "My Sex Life ...," superbly embodies Gabriel's suspension between responsibility and selfishness. Playing in effect a variation of Christine, her breakthrough part in Assayas' 1994 "Cold Water," the incredible Ledoyen projects a feral sexual intensity that she credibly balances with self-loathing and risk-taking. Balibar and Cluzet are equally fine, low-key and taciturn, like the balance of the film, masters at withholding and concealment. Ali Sarka Toure's plaintive, spare guitar work is a suitably trenchant aural corollary to the film's formal elegance.

LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER Zeitgeist Films A Polygram Film Distribution release