Although parts of it are downright bad--even repulsive--Love Me If You Dare slowly, painfully wins our trust. Once we get past the shortcomings of its constituent parts (especially the sometimes nauseating mawkishness), the whole becomes strangely fascinating, creating a situation where near misses in both the children's-film and amour fou departments begin to add up to something that vaguely resembles a hit.

The protagonists of Love Me If You Dare are two unhappy people whose mutual passion wrecks their lives, even though, paradoxically, it also permits them to survive extreme childhood trauma. Julien (Guillaume Canet) is left alone with his distracted father when his cancer-riddled mother dies; Sophie (Marion Cotillard), who lives in a high-rise slum with her Polish immigrant parents, is obliged to suffer ethnic slurs on a regular basis in the local schoolyard.

The nature of the friendship forged between these two outcasts is based on a system of wagers and dares. No matter how outrageous the challenge (peeing standing up in the principal's office is one of the milder demands), they are expected to carry it out at any price.

After Sophie and Julien become adults, the game remains the same, although the results become ever more destructive. Essentially, it is the only thing that keeps Julien from being swallowed by the suburbs and Sophie from disappearing into the working-class netherworld.

Our initial resistance to Love Me If You Dare (considering the original title, Jeux d'Enfants, why didn't they just call it Child's Play?) can probably best be explained in terms of overfamiliarity. Not only have we seen most of the material before, we've also seen it done better. Intense childhood friendships have been more deftly delineated in, say, René Clément's Forbidden Games and Franíƒ §ois Truffaut's Small Change. As for the folie íƒ   deux adult angle, the number of worthy Gallic challengers in this category is in the double, perhaps even triple, digits.

Some of first-time writer-director Yann Samuell's plot devices are also more than a little irritating. For instance, the youthful dream sequences, which look like blown-up drawings by troubled eight-year-olds, are more clumsy than magical, and the repetition of every version of the song "La Vie en Rose" except Edith Piaf's is downright maddening.

On the plus side, the actors are quite convincing in their parts, and Samuell does a fine job of showing how their self-absorption wreaks havoc on those around them. As the characters become more mature, their games become increasingly immature, and the line between fantasy and reality wavers dangerously. A particularly inspired touch is the way in which these characters become perhaps the most suicidal pedestrians in screen history, regularly stepping in front of speeding cars, buses, and trains in a manner that would send the rest of us to the emergency ward or the morgue.

So, yeah: despite the "odds", Love Me if You Dare really is worth the "gamble".