Since his first feature, 1987's "Stormy Monday," Figgis has been one of the most interesting -- as well as one of the most wildly uneven and frustrating -- filmmakers to emerge from Europe. He can do "straightforward" moviemaking. His 1993 version of Terrence Rattigan's "The Browning Version" was the sort of polished and moving version of a classic that Merchant-Ivory's snoozefests are supposed to be and almost never are. But Figgis has a taste for the experimental, which in his films is sometimes inseparable from the merely stylish. At his most out-there, as in the 1990 "Liebestraum," he's nothing but style. But even in "Stormy Monday" or "Leaving Las Vegas" there are moments when Figgis is willing to let a combination of music and camera effects -- in "Leaving Las Vegas," he reduced that city's skyline to blurred, limned bars of color while sax-heavy renditions of standards played on the soundtrack -- take the place of acting and writing. It's extraordinarily effective, yet it also comes close to being mood music.

Still, those moods can be damned hard to shake, and Figgis is tuned into a fatalistic, doomed romanticism that can get under your skin and stay there. (Watching "Stormy Monday" is a pleasure akin to spending an evening sunk in an armchair sipping Scotch, smoking and listening to Lee Wiley records.) For Figgis, who in an interview in the current Sight and Sound talks about being bored with the conventional narrative structure of movies, the interplay of music and image probably amounts to an attempt to capture what's sometimes called "pure cinema." I believe there is such a thing. But, paradoxically, the moments I've encountered it have always been grounded in the nuts and bolts of narrative and character -- the wobbling bowling pin that signifies death in Howard Hawks' "Scarface"; the scene in the record-store listening booth in "Before Sunrise" when you know Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy have fallen in love simply by the way they avoid looking at each other. They are moments when only moving images seem capable of capturing the emotions and interactions of the moments so concisely or profoundly. The trouble with most directors who go chasing after pure cinema is that they think they can find it by freeing themselves from the nuts and bolts, and that's part of the problem Figgis faces here.

What's best about "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" is how the various episodes capture the texture and weight of Nic's experience. But every one of its best moments would be richer if it were grounded in a fully developed narrative. Many of Figgis' instincts are sharp. He doesn't put a rosy glow around burgeoning sexuality. By linking it constantly with death and violence, he calls up the stomach-churning mixture of nausea and excitement our first brushes with either of those experiences can provoke. The sight of 5-year-old Nic (John Cowey) spying an old man fetishistically appraising a teenage Kenyan girl kitted out in lingerie too big for her provokes the same uncomprehending fascination (and perhaps fear) in Nic as when he sees blood still dripping from the ear of a factory worker's corpse. As moments like this come back to the grown Nic (Julian Sands, doing his damnedest to flesh out Figgis' conception of the role), Figgis conveys how shameful or frightening moments from your past can suddenly overcome you, can still seem startlingly raw.

Like "Leaving Las Vegas," "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" was shot in Super 16mm and blown up to 35mm. Benoit Delhomme's cinematography has a slightly grainy texture and a ripeness that comes from being saturated in yellows and reds. Figgis has claimed that Super 16 allows him to shoot longer takes (up to 14 minutes) and what that's revealed is his talent for capturing unmediated experience, for allowing us to see characters simply going through their lives. This works beautifully in the sex scenes. In one of them, 16-year-old Nic (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers of "Velvet Goldmine") is making out with his girlfriend Susan (Kelly MacDonald) in her parents' parlor while trying to keep from waking them. The scene goes on for a few minutes, allowing Figgis to capture the ebb and flow, the implicit negotiation, of adolescent sex. Nic becomes more and more excited, Susan is put more and more on her guard. A foot crashing into a tea tray puts things to a stop. Cups and saucers are righted, the girl rearranges herself and the poor guy finds himself back at square one. It's impossible to think of any other way of doing that scene, of capturing that interplay without allowing it to go on. And it's the same when the adult Nic comes up behind his wife (Johanna Torrel) while she's chopping vegetables for dinner and begins squeezing her nipple. We sense her annoyance, then her almost involuntary arousal, and finally the mixture of impatience and excitement with which she raises her skirt. The whole of a marriage seems to exist in that scene, the familiarity and comfort, the skirmish for power, the resentments that no longer need to be spoken, the sexual connection that, temporarily at least, can blot everything else out.

If "The Loss of Sexual Innocence" is Figgis' most extreme work as a stylist, moments like these suggest that he could go even deeper by simply focusing on his skills as an observer. In one scene, we follow a young woman (Saffron Burrows) as she gets out of bed in the morning, her lazy movements as she drags herself to the shower contrasting with her precise clipped ones as she dresses herself for work, appraising herself in the mirror, changing her outfit. All the while the radio is broadcasting news, and the total effect of the scene is of the world, bit by bit, making itself felt in this woman's life, of a private persona giving way to a public one.

That's a kind of observation of behavior that perhaps only Eric Rohmer or Jacques Rivette has captured. And combined with the superb work Figgis has done in the past with actors (and does here with, in small roles, MacDonald and Gina McKee, currently to be seen as the only human being in "Notting Hill"), it suggests that the experimentation Figgis engages in here may be hindering his best work. During some of the most image-driven moments, the classical piano music he uses on the soundtrack gives the film an almost perfume-ad air. And the denouement, with Nic and his crew precipitating a disaster during the making of a film, resurrects the clichis that equate the making of a film in the third world with colonialist exploitation. It also resurrects the worst parts of the Adam and Eve story, the combination of misogyny and Puritanism.

There's plenty of evidence of Figgis' talent throughout "The Loss of Sexual Innocence," but it also suggests he's still discovering the nature of that talent. Figgis' talent is in the specifics, not the atmospherics. And it's not in the story of the Fall; he's one of the few directors who can put sex on the screen without being crippled by shame.