Pussy galore

THERE'S no way of knowing what writer-director Alan Ball has suffered -- or enjoyed -- at the hands of women. But based solely on Towelhead, Ball's directing debut (he also wrote the screenplay), it may be best to remain in ignorance: This is a man more creepily obsessed with vaginas than a roomful of OB/GYNs.

Not since the camp-horror classic Teeth has a movie viewed female genitalia with such equal measures of fascination and disgust, nor presented them as such unequivocal instruments of destruction and salvation. But while Teeth was a hilarious, satirical response to unchecked sexism, Towelhead plays it straight, shaping its off-color material into an earnest commentary on sexual and racial bigotry. Much of the blame for this may lie with Alicia Erin's novel (which I haven't read and which provides the basis for the screenplay), but even so, the material's journey from page to screen is firmly in the hands of the director. There's simply nowhere for Ball to hide.

Set in the early 1990s as Bush the elder is about to launch Desert Storm, Towelhead (whose original title was Nothing is Private -- the opposite of a movie in which everything is privates) opens with 13-year-old Jasira (the lovely Summer Bishil) receiving a pubic makeover from mom's boyfriend. The introduction of razor to crotch is filmed, accurately, as simultaneously exciting and terrifying, and Ball deserves credit for not shying away from Jasira's sexual arousal. Despite her inexperience and the movie's surfeit of leering predators, the girl is never tagged as simply a virginal victim; her natural curiosity about her body is integral to the plot. It's a tough line to walk and it's one of the few things the movie gets right.

Almost every other character, however, is compelled to behave like the punchline of a sick joke. Jasira's mother (a shrill, thankless role for Maria Bello), discovering her newly deforested daughter, doesn't mince words. "This is your fault!" she screams, packing her off to Dad's home in a sterile Houston suburb. Dad Peter (a wonderful performance by Rifat Maroun), a NASA engineer and Lebanese Christian who despises Saddam and supports the war, is unprepared for a daughter whose clothing and habits flout his conservative parenting philosophy.

Save for his tendency to interpret father-daughter bonding as an opportunity to smack Jasira into submission, Peter is basically a decent man caught off-guard by his daughter's pubescence and helpless to block its devastating consequences. The main problem with Towelhead -- and for its embattled heroine -- is that virtually every character responds to Jasira's jailbait beauty with abuse. The Army reservist next door (a shifty Aaron Eckhart), unhinged by her ripeness, sniffs after her like a horny mastiff while her black schoolmate (Eugene Jones) yells "sand nigger" in public before privately taking over her Brazilian shaving routine. Only Toni Collette, as a well-meaning neighbor and Jasira's ad hoc protector, provides relief from the screenplay's unrelenting catalogue of victimization.

Distasteful and discomfiting, Towelhead does little to showcase Ball's gift for ensemble drama, exemplified on HBO by the middle-class undertakers of Six Feet Under and the white-trash vampires of True Blood. Tonally indecisive, he veers from humor to horror and from earnestness to cynicism, aiming for Welcome to the Dollhouse and more closely approximating the hyperbole of his script for American Beauty. The movie's strengths -- an awareness of the many faces of racism and an unusually subtle portrayal of Middle Eastern immigrants -- never surmount the cheap jokes about menstruation and a plot that turns men into sex-starved morons. Not even Judd Apatow would have shown so little finesse.