Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) and Flo (Molly Parker) cross a line in The Center of the World.

In neighboring scenes in Wayne Wang’s The Center of theWorld, an attractive young Los Angeles couple engage in wildly divergent activities. In one, they indulge a fantasy, cooperating in a provocative act of sex that involves a cube of ice and a bottle of hot sauce. The next day, they sit around a hotel room and play video games on a laptop computer. Which actions, the film overtly wonders, are the sexier? Not surprisingly, it concludes that the casual chemistry of a lazy day at play is far more powerfully erotic than an explicit but nigh anonymous sex act that began as one person’s wildest dream.

  Written by Ellen Benjamin Wong, The Center of the World is the story of two financially prosperous but largely alienated people who might have had a romantic chance with each other if they hadn’t jumped from "Hi, how are you" right into the sack. Richard (Peter Sarsgaard) is a wildly successful computer engineer. We never learn what he’s designed or why it’s a hot commodity and that’s part of the film’s point. Richard is smart, talented and fabulously rich (hence his name), and could not be more disconnected from his work. His professional accomplishment is like found rather than earned money; it came so easily, he has no regard for it.

  One day Richard meets a pretty girl in a coffee shop and endeavors to strike up a conversation. Florence (Molly Parker) is flip and elusive and refuses to reveal her last name. This is an important detail because it signals whether Richard will, failing to learn her family name, ever really get to know her, nor at some level will we. Florence does confide that she’s a stripper, however, and that she works at a naughty nightclub called Pandora’s Box. Almost from the beginning in this film, the question arises whether once these two people have literally opened each other up even hope shall remain inside.

  Naturally, Richard goes to catch Florence’s act, and pretty soon the two of them are sitting across a cocktail table exuding enough sexual energy to light up L.A.’s San Fernando Valley for a week. Florence may call herself a stripper, but she brings in the bucks as a lap dancer, and she’s eager to perform for Richard up close and personal. The rules, though, are as rigid as a steel girder. She has the green light to touch you. You touch her, and you get your thumbs broken. Richard wishes for flexibility, but agrees to the terms.

  A short time later, Richard approaches Florence on the street while she’s putting up posters for a band in which she plays drums. He wants to invite her to accompany him on a vacation to Las Vegas. As first, she’s appalled. But when he suggests appropriate "compensation," she grows interested, and when he offers $10,000 for a three-day weekend, she agrees – but with conditions. They may engage in sexual activity of a kind somewhat more advanced than a lap dance, but the same basic restrictions apply: no kissing, no penetration and no discussion of feelings. Moreover, all sexual activity will be confined to the hours between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m.

  Vegas is the perfect metaphor for what takes place in this movie. Everything is handed down and artificial. There’s an Eiffel Tower, Venetian Canal, London Bridge and Statue of Liberty, but there’s no Paris, Venice, London or New York. For her appointed four hours a day, Florence paints the freckles out of her All-American looks and prances about in skin-tight skirts so short you can see her thong underwear if she bends over to slip on her shoe. Which she does, of course, repeatedly. But other than every inch of her body she reveals nothing to Richard, and though he experiences plenty of pure sexual release, he is not satisfied.

  The real moments of pleasure come when they flirt over lunch or casually touch each other in a taxi. Florence admits in a phone call to a friend that she thinks she likes Richard. But she doesn’t like herself nearly enough. When she relents and lets him kiss her, relents again and consents to an act of intercourse, she feels that the fine line she’s drawn between how she earns a living and prostitution has been fatefully crossed. And she instantly withdraws like a turtle taking refuge in its shell. Richard responds, as men so often do, violently.

  The Center of the World will prove far too sexually explicit for many viewers, both in terms of what we see characters do and what they say they have done. But the picture has a lesson to teach. In some other circumstance, Richard and Florence might have made a real connection. But in order to love one another, each would first need to know the security of self-regard. .