French cinema has never been short on enfants terribles, but few have seized the moniker as aggressively as François Ozon, a coolly perverse provocateur who churns out scandalous work nearly as quickly as it can run through a projector. After directing several shorts, Ozon made his feature debut with 1998's See The Sea, which, viewed in tandem with the sublime 15-minute attachment A Summer Dress, summed up his perverse preoccupation with sex, violence, and death in all their permutations. He's made an astonishing four films in the two years since, none more certain to provoke than Criminal Lovers, which recasts the fairytale Hansel and Gretel as a pair of murderous teenagers on the lam. In his dark forest, there's no trail of breadcrumbs, the gingerbread house is a dank cabin with a rat-infested cellar, and the ogre is a homosexual cannibal who's arguably the most moral and sympathetic of the three. The story opens with the seduction and brutal stabbing of a high-school student by Jérémie Rénier and Natacha Régnier (The Dreamlife Of Angels), an act arranged by the coyly manipulative Régnier, who claims the student raped her. After knocking off a jewelry store and heading far out of town, the two drag the body deep into the woods to bury it, but wind up losing their way. Tired and hungry, they break into a cabin for food, but they're caught by the grim and imposing Miki Manojlovic, who locks them in his cellar and vows to make them pay for their transgressions. When Manojlovic pulls Rénier out of the cellar to fatten him up for dinner (he prefers to keep his girls lean), he leads the boy to awaken certain latent tendencies he's never been forced to confront. The wicked irony of the title is that Rénier and Régnier are not lovers at all—a fact she repeatedly twists to her advantage—so the film becomes a metaphorical battle over his sexuality, with maturation awaiting at the end of a long nightmare. Because it's clearly grounded in fable, Criminal Lovers skirts obvious charges of gross misogyny and homophobia, allowing Ozon the freedom to shatter all the taboos he can dream up. Littering the screen with subversive nods to Bonnie & Clyde, Night Of The Hunter, and, best of all, Bambi, Ozon flaunts the seductive nastiness on which he's made his reputation.