"Nénette et Boni" (1996), Colin's first collaboration with director Claire Denis, is an odd little film about a hot brother and sister, brought up under strange and unspecifically bad circumstances. Nénette is a pregnant teenager; Boni is an angry, perverted pizza-maker, obsessed by fantasies of raping a local bakery woman who happens to be married to Vincent Gallo, who is basically playing himself, baking croissants in Paris for no good reason, and whining about it in his famously nasal Gallo way, as if he is selling discount menswear in Yonkers. It is a particularly ridiculous piece of casting that suggests that Denis abused her power as director in order to surround herself with pretty young men, and God bless her for it.

This is Colin's most seething role -- he is so frustrated and horny one can imagine baseball bats sweating out of his perfect skin. He performs a really nice, difficult transformation. Boni and his sister, both rootless, strange children with no intimacies, forge a kind of vile alliance with each other. Boni becomes interested in Nénette's unborn child; it stokes a tenderness in him that is on the opposite end of the emotional spectrum from his abusive sex fantasies.

There are a lot of scenes of Colin, as there are in a number of his films, shirtless, masturbating. He talks to himself while he does it, sneering as if he was forcing Mrs. Gallo to perform perverse acts on him. When confronted with the wife in person, he can do little but stare at her with powerless hunger.

At the end of the film, Boni finds a strange pleasure in holding his sister's newborn child. It is Colin's delicacy that lets you know that Boni, for all his hard-up, frustrated rage, isn't a sicko. He tells the baby, with infinite tenderness, "You pissed on me. Yeah. You know that? You pissed on me." It sounds like familial love, and not grounds for a potential child protective services intervention -- something of a small miracle.

"Secret Defense" (1998) is an ambitious mess of a film with extremely clunky emotional logic, starring a brittle and overwrought Sandrine Bonnaire playing a scientist who plots unlikely violence after her brother Paul -- a broody, thuggy, track-suited Colin -- convinces her that an old family friend, played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, killed their father. It is one of Colin's least dimensional roles; Paul is quiet, stony-faced, stubbornly obsessed with revenge. There are bizarre scenes in which Bonnaire throws infuriated, shrill, screaming tantrums at her brother while he stares back at her, unmoved by her hysteria. Colin is able to transmit the impenetrable, bullheaded rebelliousness and monomania that are the earmarks of an angry young man, but there is not much else for him to do; the film meanders weirdly and never coheres. (The turquoise-eyed Radziwilowicz is the most compelling animal on-screen; slightly pudgy, urbane and full of paradoxes, he radiates an interesting, Bill-Clinton-but-more-ethnic, middle-aged sexiness.)

"The Dreamlife of Angels" (1998) is a total bummer, one of those films that makes you feel like you're slowly swallowing an entire live frog made of poorly imagined human pain. It is, however, Colin's most frankly carnal role; there are a lot of sweeping camera crawls over his marvelous body, having feral sex with a miserable, thrashing blonde, played by Natacha Rignier.

Colin brings nice complexity to the role of Chriss, a rich, sadistic playboy toying with the unstable emotions of poor factory girls. We only see him acting polite and reasonable; we, the audience, somehow just know, despite the fact that Chriss shows every sign of caring about the blonde, that he doesn't really care about her. He smiles, he kisses, he gently whispers, "Doucement, doucement," when she is trying to scratch his face off while he's screwing her.

Colin looks preternaturally amazing in this film, leaning against a bar with his sexual stare, a dark purple silk shirt bringing out an iridescence in his glossy black hair and olive-yellow skin. It's a sinister, super-concentrated, energetically charged male beauty that renders the viewer awestruck -- Colin is the only human I can think of who could single-handedly upstage a pair of lions mating.

"Beau Travail" (1999), a loose interpretation of Melville's "Billy Budd," is another rhapsodic ode by Claire Denis to Colin's unclothed body. Colin is Gilles Sentain, a charismatic hero in the foreign legion, who finds himself on the bad side of a jealous, ugly, abusive commanding officer, who opts to make Sentain's life in Djibouti miserable because the other men admire him too much. The film is as muscular, dirty, shaved, artsy and homoerotic as any Bruce Weber campaign, and must viewing for anyone interested in wallpapering their bedroom ceiling with images of Colin's torso. The role calls for him to be saintly and "Cool Hand Luke"-ish -- a strong, silent, long-suffering, unbreakable stoic, blister-lipped and dying of thirst on an endless, cracked expanse of desert salt flats.

Benoît Jacquot's "Sade" (2000) is a great film, centering on the incarceration of the decadent Marquis with other aristocrats awaiting the guillotine at Picpus, during the Reign of Terror. Colin plays Fournier, Jacobin deputy to Robespierre and rival of Sade for the affections of a hot, cat-faced woman. Sade, in this tale, is depicted as a thoughtful, life-and-freedom-loving philosopher. Colin's Jacobin is a man enslaved to his own hateful weakness -- he is jealous and sexually brutal to their mutual girlfriend. Sade, in a rather obvious reversal, is gentle, respectful and tender with her. Colin actually succeeds in making himself unattractive here; his eyes look completely different than usual -- beady, ratlike. His nose is sharp and beaky, he holds himself in concave postures of deep self-loathing and insecurity. He is nearly unrecognizable; his very aura is different than it is in other films.

The Bogart-like Daniel Auteuil, as Sade, is marvelously comfortable in the cerebral role of the reckless, liberated artiste; but the unearthly Isild Le Besco steals the film as Emile de Lancris; she is the most singularly beautiful inginue since Olivia Hussey's Juliet, and thrillingly smart. I predict great things for this young actress; she has strange, perverse fire behind a face that is Zen-like and serene in its perfect symmetry.

I was unable to locate any copies whatsoever of "Snowboarder" (2003) (but if the title is any indication, it is yet another volte-face for Colin, who usually doesn't participate in such fad-fodder), and while 2004 gave us "L'Intrus" ("The Intruder"), another Claire Denis film with Colin, it is not yet available in the U.S. He is in production on more French films, which can be tracked through a rather humble, if devoted, American fan Web site.

With any luck, Colin will appear in some English-speaking role eventually, but I somewhat doubt it -- an actor of Colin's intelligence knows better than to muck around in the cultural tar pit of Hollywood. In France, Colin retains his eclectic choices and his integrity, and probably sees no reason to trade that in for the falling currency of Hollywood celebrity.

Anyway, reading subtitles over a nude Grigoire Colin will never be a chore.

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