From West Side Story to this year's Baby Boy, films about poverty and inner-city life tend to focus on loyalty, commitment, self-defined family ties, and the burning emotions prompted by an uncertain environment and a probable short life span. Jacques Doillon's 1999 film Petits Frères instead takes a fresh, if thematically disjointed, tack in exploring the shallow, fickle, loyalty-free lives of adolescents trying to get by in a world where the only responsible adults are the policemen trying to arrest them. The "petits frères" ("little brothers," here translated consistently as "little fellas") of Paris' mostly black and Arabic Pantin housing projects are too young to join gangs, sell drugs, or fight for neighborhood turf, but not too young to acquire guns, steal anything in sight, and act as errand-boys and hopeful protégés to the "big fellas." After her sexually abusive stepfather returns home after a long absence, aggressive 13-year-old protagonist Stéphanie Touly escapes to Pantin, unaware of its dangers. She radiates defensive hostility when approached by a group of young boys, led by mercurial, personable Iliès Sefraoui, but casually trusts a drug-dealing friend of a friend and insinuates herself into his crowded household. As she sleeps, Sefraoui and his small pack steal her precious pet dog Kim, hoping to sell her to some "big fellas" who bet on dogfights. Furious and grieving, Touly begins a hopeless search of the projects, and a fundamentally conflicted Sefraoui offers his help. Doillon stretched the boundaries of the cinematically impossible with his heartbreakingly powerful 1996 movie Ponette, which convincingly admitted audiences to the perspective of a 4-year-old girl grieving for her dead mother, but his alchemy doesn't work as effectively here. His admittedly fascinating subjects, played convincingly and naturalistically by non-actors, are too diverse, guarded, and unpredictable to track through his many minor plot twists. Their constantly changing interactions, which evolve to fit the slow but crowded plotline, are necessarily about surfaces, pretenses, and the quicksilver emotions of prepubescents, but Doillon follows them as passively as a good documentarian, rarely scratching their surfaces to reveal what they're really feeling. There are a few exceptions, as Sefraoui's friends hold forth in private about the drugs they'll deal, the cars they'll steal, and the houses they'll buy when they're old enough, or as Touly, in a parallel scene, wistfully describes a wedding dress she once coveted. Such moments are as sweet, sad, intense, and fleeting in the film as they must be in real life. Unfortunately, they're also as rare in the film as they must be in real life.