My guard goes up (usually with good reason) whenever I see a film dealing with on-set dynamics or the trivialities of actors and directors in the throes of creation. Claude Miller's ("Alias Betty") new film about youth, filmmaking, passion and art is a case in point. It's a film so closely connected to its laughably idealistic and naïve young lead that his own work, on display in the film, is about as petty, shallow and insipid as "Le Petite Lili" itself.

In a lush French country home, film star Mado (Nicole Garcia, in the film's best performance) and director boyfriend Brice (Bernard Giraudeau) return for a weekend to visit her idealistic, novice filmmaker son Julien (Robinson Stevenin), the polar opposite of their commercially driven world. Julien is consumed by his artistic ideals and love for Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), a nymph-like local girl and star of his first film. A collection of crusty and romantically challenged characters round out the extended family, and the sexual and creative tensions hit a breaking point that's as much about the clash between old and young - rather the old longing for and threatened by the young - as it is about buried family resentments.

Ludivine Sagnier, almost as fetching here as she was in this year's art-house mystery "Swimming Pool," again makes good on her physical charms by disrobing in the film's gorgeous opening sequence. But once the film gets that necessity out of the way and settles down into Chekhovian territory with its family dilemmas and reunifications, it's strictly standard stuff that's impossibly superficial and dressed up with some elegant cinematography and a more than capable and attractive cast that someone forgot to give anything interesting to do.

The film awkwardly fumbles later when it flashes forward four years. After nicely establishing Julie's new, polished visage and movie-star success, it devolves into the story of her unexplainable desperation to star as herself, in a wildly silly and pretentious dramatization of the traumatic and melodramatic events that took place that summer four years earlier. Of course, the still idealistic and now-married Julien is directing the film, apparently without any commercial compromises whatsoever. It doesn't help that Stevenin sneers through both past and present sequences like he's having an awful time playing the cliché angry young man that Julien is.

One major problem is that actor Stevenin, while more than decent looking and with genuine movie-star heat, never makes Julien more than a standard, idealistic artist "type" that's just too familiar in literary and movie conventions, so he never becomes a real person. There are major attempts to humanize him in the film's climax, with a marriage, a son and an apparent newfound maturity. But what's missing is how he became this person. Missing also is the doomed affair between Brice and Julie.

The elliptical nature Miller employs might have possibly robbed the film of some very good drama. Nice looking, and well enough acted but a completely empty vessel - "La Petite Lili" is strictly eye candy, with nothing to satisfy the heart.