Ladies Room is one of those arty films where you sense good intentions and see horrible results.

 Although this Canada-Britain co-production features such names as John Malkovich, Molly Parker, Lorraine Bracco and Greta Scacchi in the cast and was directed by an Oscar winner, it is an unmitigated disaster.

 The Oscar-honoured individual is Gabriella Cristiani, who won her trophy for editing The Last Emperor (1987) for Bernardo Bertolucci. She also worked on a clutch of other Bertolucci features, including Last Tango In Paris and La Luna.

 Cristiani co-edits Ladies Room. She does a decent job, I suppose. But it's her first-time direction that is so ill-conceived and executed that there is little an editor can do to save the film from being a pretentious folly.

 Foolish script

 The foolish script was written by the team of Andree Pelletier, Genevieve Lefebvre, Natalina Di Landro and Amanda Roberts. It tackles serious relationship issues from a female point of view but does so in a stagey, theatrical manner that might have been a better play than it is a movie.

 The piece opens in a vast room of anxious women waiting on black-and-white squares while curtains billow like clouds. It turns out they're all dead and purgatory is the waiting room in a gigantic washroom for women. Hence the title.

 There are two young newcomers in the room -- played by Molly Parker and Veronica Ferres -- which means they are freshly dead and a little confused. So the other women crowd around and watch highlights of the two newcomers' recent life and accidental deaths back on earth.

 Both were involved in tacky, torrid affairs. Parker is a malicious wench who had moved in on Bracco's husband hoping for personal gain. Ferres is the naive goof who got swept up into an affair with Malkovich, who is in turn married to an extremely pregnant and hysterical Scacchi.

 Their stories are shown to us on screen as the women in the ladies room watch on video. The two stories entwine.

 Both are played out at fever pitch against a melodramatic background, one in a theatre where Bracco is starring in a play, the other in an opera house where Bellini's Beatrice Di Tenda is heard but not seen but is meant to set a tone.

 Cristiani either encourages or allows her actors to do some very curious things. Malkovich, for example, acts as the buffoon, literally falling up and down staircases and repeating a fake blind man's schtick when he is trying to sneak into a ladies room at the opera. It's ridiculous. It's embarrassing.

 As for the movie's so-called message, some sort of quasi-feminist diatribe, Ladies Room is so preposterous that anything it has to say is lost in the flushing of toilets.

(This film is rated AA)

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