The writer-director is Roger Avary, who directed "Killing Zoe" and co-authored Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction." (Whether he cast James Van Der Beek as his lead because he looks more like Tarantino than any other working actor, I cannot guess.) In all of his work, Avary is fond of free movement up and down the timeline, and here he uses an ingenious approach to tell the stories of three main characters who are involved in, I dunno, five or six pairings. He begins with an "End of the World" party at Camden College, the ultimate party school, follows a story thread, then rewinds and follows another. He also uses fast-forward brilliantly to summarize a European vacation in a few hilarious minutes.

The yo-yo timeline works because we know, or quickly learn, who the characters are, but sometimes it's annoying, as when we follow one sex romp up to a certain point and then return to it later for the denouement. This style may at times reflect the confused state of mind of the characters, who attend a college where no studying of any kind is ever glimpsed, where the only faculty member in the movie is having an affair with an undergraduate, and where the improbable weekend parties would put the orgies at Hef's pad to shame.

The parties are a lapse of credibility. I cannot believe, for example, that large numbers of co-eds would engage in topless lesbian breastplay at a campus event, except in the inflamed imaginations of horny undergraduates. But assuming that they would: Is it plausible that the horny undergraduates wouldn't even look at them? Are today's undergraduate men so (choose one) blase, Politically Correct or emasculated that, surrounded by the enthusiastic foreplay of countless half-naked women, they would blandly carry on their conversations? This is not to imply that "The Rules of Attraction" is in any sense a campus sex-romp comedy. There is comedy in it, but so burdened are the students by their heavy loads of alcoholism, depression, drug addiction and bisexual promiscuity that one yearns for them to be given respite by that cliche of the 1960s, the gratuitous run through meadows and woods. These kids need fresh air.

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