by SARAH ROWLAND

Making the transition from model to serious actress is a risky career move with a poor success rate. For every Lauren Hutton there are a dozen Cindy Crawfords. But what Euro-famed model Olga Kurylenko has working in her favour is that she’s not a North American runway sensation. This more than halves the amount of critics waiting to pounce if she should fail. She also has something else going for her, something Crawford clearly lacked: enough talent to carry a movie, albeit an overly affected French psychodrama.

In her debut feature, The Ring Finger, Kurylenko plays Iris, an impossibly beautiful and ridiculously chic drifter who seems to float from one dead-end job to another. After getting canned from a bottling plant, she gets a gig as a receptionist at a mysterious lab where people come from all over to seal up “specimens” they don’t want to throw out, but can’t bare to live with—such as ashes from a fire that burned down their house, an ex-lover’s poem, a first pet etc. Apparently, there’s a market for this. What you look under in the Yellow Pages is anyone’s guess though. She soon learns that the girl she replaced disappeared under strange circumstances, which only seems to fuel her attraction toward her creepy and controlling employer (Marc Barbé). This of course leads to the kind of avant-garde sex that is so popular in French cinema and probably the root cause of many a pinched back nerve in France.

After a hard day’s work of labelling beakers and screwing her boss, she heads back to her lodging, where she shares a room with a seemingly mute young sailor (Stipe Erceg of The Edukators). She has nights. He has days. But occasionally they cross paths on their way to and from work. Here, director Diane Bertrand teasingly builds up a much sweeter sexual tension than the one with the mad scientist—to the point where you wish the movie was about these two. But alas, it is only a subplot, and there’s still plenty of pretentious head-tripping to be had back at the lab.

Kurylenko may have beaten the model-turned-actress odds by proving she can do more than strike a pose. Now all she has to do is find a script that isn’t such a well-mannered pile of crap.

The Ring Finger opens Friday, Dec. 2

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