At a glance, it might look as if François Ozon's film adaptation of Fassbinder's early play Water Drops on Burning Rocks has given us something like Noel Coward's The Vortex for the Baader-Meinhof generation.

In a handsome and fastidiously maintained bachelor apartment in an unnamed German city some 20 years in the past - this is a world of records that are kept dust-free in their sleeves, and white roll-neck sweaters worn under jackets - a good-looking older man, Leo, seduces a young boy, Franz.

Time passes, and they have a bickering domestic ménage. The boy's fiancée, Anna, returns; they prepare to flee. But Leo seduces her too; Leo's old girlfriend Vera also appears on the scene and the film's climax arrives with the four of them doing a kind of vaudeville dance number to Tanz Ein Samba Mit Mir as the preamble to a group sex session in which Franz, shocked and yearning for the bourgeois conneries of hearth and home, cannot participate.

There's a residual trace of supercilious theatre radicalism in this piece, made more uncomfortable by its evident datedness. But for all the occasional creakiness, Ozon's film works as an elegant, mischievous chamber piece about the mystery of erotic submission and the mortality of desire.

Although set in one interior location, this movie never looks too stagy. Ozon prowls with feline surefootedness around the apartment. We move easily from the tiled bathroom, where Leo tries to enjoy a relaxing bath while Franz has the stereo on too loud, to the swinging and liberated bedroom with its creepy wall-size mirror. It is clear that this is to be the arena not merely for uninhibited desire, but much houseproud fussiness. On the point of getting Franz into bed, Leo chivvies him into the bedroom and says: "I'll wash the glasses and be right in." Wash the glasses ? When he's just about to get it on? We thought he was supposed to be mad about the boy. Can't the dirty glasses wait?

Apparently not. And the writing is on the wall for this relationship, shown degenerating into a desperate parody of loveless marriage, with Franz cast as the put-upon servant, more housewife than houseboy, who can do nothing right. Bernard Giraudeau gives a strong performance as the vain, masterful Leo, priding himself on looking young for 50, and perpetually smoothing his suspiciously jet-black hair.

As Vera, his embittered older lover, Anna Thomson walks around in a state of shock, devastated by the realisation that she will brood about the faithless Leo every day for the rest of her life, while he will hardly give her a second thought. (It is a very different role from the one Thomson had in Cannes this year, in Amos Kollek's Allenesque light comedy, Fast Food, Fast Women.)

Some critics have seen in the transposition from German to French a pleasing transfer of emphasis from the astringency and strident ironies associated with Fassbinder to the cool, cruel poise of a French comedy of sexual jealousy and sexual identity. That said, there is still a distinctively German tone to the movie, from the way Franz languorously murmurs Heinrich Heine's Lorelei to the fact that he wears lederhosen around the house.

It may be that in modish intellectual circles in Europe, the novels of Michel Houellebecq have renewed sexual desire and promiscuity as subjects of high seriousness: subjects from which disquisitions on the future of society and culture can be developed. Water Drops on Burning Rocks may find its voice in this discursive current: it is a film in which the search for conquest and sexual pleasure is utterly dominant, and yet perpetually found to be emotionally and intellectually negligible.

Ozon's movie shows a nexus of relationships tested to destruction on Leo's double bed and yet nothing seems to be left afterwards but the wreckage. The older man is revered as someone who "teaches" both Franz and Anna in the ways of physical love - and yet the scholars of this ambiguous college of Eros can only graduate in disaffection.

When quizzed about his family by Leo at the beginning of the movie, Franz claims that he loves his mother best of all, and yet this relationship signally fails to deliver any redemptive meaning: by the time Ozon lowers the curtain, she appears casually indifferent to Franz's unhappy, melodramatic fate. Moments of compassion fizzle and expire like the water drops of the title.

It is a slight film in some ways, and maybe a little claustrophobic and lacking in nourishment, but the polish and style of Ozon's direction shapes it, and gives it wit and panache.