With La Bardot gone to the dogs’ and other furry friends’ rights, Nouvelle Vague sexiness out of vogue, and witty innuendo in intergender repartee passé, France’s libertine fame and pride are hurting. Along comes Exterminating Angels/Les Anges exterminateurs to deliver the coup de grâce.

The upside is that Jean-Claude Brisseau’s soft-core film should be a pick-me-up for the Brits because it’s more awful than their Michael Winterbottom’s 9 Songs. Also, the newer movie does provide a share of Gallic and other guffaws for those determined to salvage something for their money.

To give the filmmaker his due, he “find[s] some elements in the film rather funny. And I’m happy that some audiences have a laugh, at least in the beginning.” Indeed, as the movie’s François (Frédéric Van Den Driessche) conducts pre-screen-test interviews for his project on women’s sexuality, and before we realize the heavy-handed pseudo that will pile up to gag eventually on a title daring to read “The absurdity of it all!” there is the not so bad possibility of a wry vision of auteur theory. The hero’s concept fatuous, still a flurry of hopefuls’ nervous reactions are nice, and one bookish brunette (Marine Danaux is Agnès) does for his appraisal the interrupted home style bump-and-grind that doesn’t do it for her boyfriend.

The point of all this, however, is something or other about a voyeur who, in the face of warnings, does not see that he plays with fire observing others but is blind to their reaching out to him. The coldness of the artist in observing life at a remove is a venerable theme, treated by the literary likes of Henry James and indeed central to Hawthorne, but here so embarrassingly done as unintentionally to bring about titters, not titillations. Male voiceover augments the nonsense with ponderous puzzlers about “the lampposts are in need of their long scarlet covers,” “the great blue desert is just a charred hell,” “it’s time to cast their red shrouds,” “hear the electric schools sing and blaze.”

With his unkempt handsomeness, fourtyish François does not appreciate how irresistible he proves to the nubile set, not even when two former actresses of his separately draw wistful might-have-been fingers along his cheek. His attractive wife (Sophie Bonnet), too, repeats that “you never understand anything” even while confessing to jealousy of “your babes.”

Coming some of them from psychiatrist families, his starlets have daddy problems and ooze suggestions that he himself is a taboo father substitute. They see through, yet flock to, this figure who is non-sexual with them. No male flesh displayed beyond his unbuttoned chest, the females frontally cavort singly or in pas à deux et à trios. They claim to fall in love with this or that co-performer but in their hearts only have eyes for Daddy Director, who is “only partly me, . . . outwardly,” shrugs Brisseau.

This opening night feature at Lincoln Center’s “Film Comments Selects” from international festivals (Cannes) has its non-Buñuel “angels” -- or, as one freaking-out nymphet writhes, the Devil (of whom she is “the Beloved”) -- in two female apparitions (Raphaële Godin, Margaret Zenou) who, invisible to the other players, offer up cryptic aphorisms but, like mere mortals, also love François. He, in his unphysical observer turn, has, not maman, but grand-mère issues, that dead dame appearing in his nightmares and the audience’s.

From the enviable bevy, three are chosen for the magnum opus: blonde Julie, brunette Charlotte, prim Stéphanie (Lise Bellynck, Maroussia Dubreuil, and Marie Allan). To be replaced after a later crisis by schoolgirlish Céline (Apolline Louis), they turn on to faux “Bolero” for the camera eye, an extension of that of their deadpan filming Svengali. All but the man behind the camera see this can lead to no good, but, lest we lag behind, a scruffy friend-maybe lover-maybe cop is brought in (François Négret, in “friendly participation”).

Ridiculously burdened by the rough fruits of his emotional emptiness, director François keeps on plying his trade. Nothing is to be learned here.

(Released by IFC First Take; not rated by MPAA.)