Like so many of the new French films, Siegrid Alnoy's "She's One of Us" ("Elle est des nôtres," for Francophone snobs and purists) isn't set in Paris but rather in a relatively anonymous provincial city, in this case Annecy, in the Alpine foothills near the Swiss and Italian borders. Alnoy seems to be seeking a brutal contrast between these picturesque, sometimes stunning surroundings and the empty, routinized life of Christine (Sasha Andres), her temp-worker protagonist.

And like so many other young filmmakers -- especially Europeans -- Alnoy apparently feels duty-bound to issue a manifesto explaining what she's doing. I have read this but will scrupulously try to ignore it, the way I've ignored Spike Lee's many bonehead pronouncements over the years. "She's One of Us" is a haunting story of loss and disorientation, anchored by Andres' extraordinary performance and Christophe Pollock's disturbing, apparently aimless traveling shots through the empty streets of suburban Annecy. It speaks for itself eloquently; we don't need the director to lecture us about how modern society is a "barren wasteland" and how Christine "seeks extreme situations which lead to the edge of reason, where humanity is defined." Sheesh.

When we meet Christine, she's holding body and soul together with a series of secretarial temp jobs, but her performance of normalcy is pretty much a sham. She overhears half of a conversation in the supermarket and repeats it the next day to her co-workers, as if the observations were hers. She takes naps in chairs at the mall (giving no notice to the young man who's watching her). Invited to go out for drinks after work, she can't even fake the rituals of social intercourse with people she doesn't really know or like. When she strikes up a casual friendship with Patricia (Catherine Mouchet), her supervisor at the temp agency, and finds out Patricia has a collection of porcelain owls, she claims to collect them herself -- and then has to race out and buy a dozen or so.

This movie may drive you nuts, but it'll also keep you on the edge of your seat: What's the story with this chick, anyway? Is she mentally disabled in some way? Or profoundly depressed, or psychotic, or a space alien? Is she a deeply closeted lesbian? (Given her uniquely frumpy style of dress, she might be a time-traveling lesbian from Virginia Woolf's circle of friends.) There's not exactly an answer to these questions, but stuff does happen. Christine gets an actual permanent job and goes through an amazing caterpillar-to-butterfly transformation, becoming a perfectly attractive 30ish woman complete with a boyfriend, sexy lingerie and plans for Italian vacations.

She also does something horrible and unforgivable, and clearly one event is existentially linked to the other. Alnoy wants us to understand, I guess, that normal life is always a performance; we all fake it, some better than others, and we've all injured other people while playing our assigned parts. Gradually, Christine becomes the target of two comically inept police detectives and their grave, philosophical supervisor, Degas (Carlo Brandt). The movie's mysterious, almost metaphysical dimensions come to the fore, and we understand why Alnoy begins the film with a quote from Dostoevsky. Sure, there's a little intellectual overreach here, but there's also a haunting vision of the strangeness of ordinary life, and a mesmerizing debut for both a director and an actress we will surely hear from again.

"She's One of Us" opened last week in New York; it may or may not spread to other cities.

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