CONFUSION OF GENDERS [Half a star]

A study in indecision. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 94 minutes. Not rated (language, full frontal nudity, sex scenes). At the Quad, 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues.

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THE central character in the cynical French sex farce “Confusion of Genders” is such an odious piece of work – weak, indecisive and shallow – that it’s hard to follow his carnal misadventures with anything approaching interest.

The men and women who join him in the sexual round robin that makes up this film are equally abhorrent, as well as, presumably, myopic – what they all see in Alain (Pascal Greggory), a bisexual lawyer with a receding hairline and an infantile manner, is anyone’s guess.

“Confusion,” written and directed by filmmaker and novelist Ilan Duran Cohen, opens with false promise – a smart montage in which Alain is talking to a naked bedmate who keeps morphing into different men and women.

Alain, who is approaching 40, thinks he might want to marry his female boss, Laurence (Nathalie Richard), who is pregnant with his child. But he’s also sleeping with Christophe (Cyrille Thouvenin), the precocious young brother of an ex-girlfriend; desperately attracted to Marc (Vincent Martinez), a good-looking but stupid client serving a life sentence for murder; and drawn toward Marc’s hairdresser girlfriend, Babette (Julie Gayet).

Cohen advances the story not a whit beyond Alain’s indecisiveness about whom to sleep with.

The only feeling the character seems capable of is lust – and when he hits on the male nurse looking after his newborn baby in the hospital, this hollow, unfunny “comedy” moves from merely tedious to nasty.