ANATOMY OF HELL

[] (One star)

Sexual perversity in France. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 78 minutes. Not rated (sex, sex, sex). At the Angelika, Houston and Mercer streets.

FRENCH filmmaker Catherine Breillat has made a career out of cerebral perversion like “Romance” (with real sex!) and “36 Fillette.”

She likes to see audiences squirm, and usually succeeds.

“Anatomy of Hell” ranks high on the squirm meter. But, unlike in most of her earlier work, there’s no emotional payoff.

A woman (Amira Casar) slashes her wrists in a nightclub bathroom.

A gay guy discovers her and asks why she did it. “Because I’m a woman,” she responds.

She then invites the man (Rocco Siffredi, the Italian porn actor who appeared in “Romance”) to visit her at her cliff-top house, where she’ll pay him to “watch me where I’m unwatchable.”

“Anatomy of Hell” unfolds over four encounters in her bedroom, a place dominated by a large crucifix over the bed.

There’s sexual perversion galore, with closeups of his-and-hers private parts.

(The credits note that a female body double was used for some scenes.)

There’s even a bit in which a garden tool is used as a sex toy.

When the drama was shown in Rotterdam, Casar flew into a rage when we asked if the sex was real.

“To insist on what’s real and what’s not smacks of McCarthyism,” she huffed.

In any event, the sex is oddly non-erotic, as cold and antiseptic as the woman’s bedroom.

Breillat is, we think, trying to say that men are easily manipulated.

But it takes more than shocking imagery to get that point across.

It takes well-written dialogue, not the pointless yammering found in “Anatomy of Hell.”