FOR an actor who not that long ago announced he would be sticking behind the camera, Sean Penn has developed a strange form of screen aversion therapy.

Only on Sunday he won the Best Actor Oscar for what was not even his best turn of the year in Mystic River, and today City Screen, York, will be opening not one but two more films featuring the feisty American.

It's All About Love was made in 2001 but only now does Thomas Vinterberg's futuristic sci-fi drama make it to the screen. Far more important, and the movie that proves Penn is mightier than his word, is Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's 21 Grams, a film as difficult on first sighting as the director's name.

Inarritu had made the kind of impact with Amores Perros not seen since Quentin Tarantino ripped the hell out of the cinema screen with Reservoir Dogs.

Love's A Bitch is the translation of the title of that Mexican debut movie - the one with the savage dog fighting, you may recall - and love's a bitch pretty much sums up the tone of this follow-up to the 2000 debut.

This time the title, 21 Grams, refers to the amount of weight lost when you die and those 21 grams are thought to represent the weight of the soul as it leaves the body.

Director Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga, who worked together on Amores Perros, are troubled indeed by weighty matters of the heart and soul.

Last time they were preoccupied with life and death, guilt and redemption; second time around they are no less preoccupied with the very same concerns, and if they still paint in broad brush strokes, they have replaced the triptych of three separate stories with another use of a triple but interlinking storyline.

The past, future and present will swap around, as if a jazz musician has done the editing, until a coherent picture finally emerges as three lives overlap with tragic and bloody consequence.

Death and life link the three together. Penn, looking even more drawn than he did in Mystic River, is a terminally ill mathematics professor awaiting a heart transplant.

Meanwhile, a wife and mother (Oscar nominee Naomi Watts) is struggling with addiction, seeking to douse the pain of her family being wiped out in a road accident. The driver, an ex-con (Benicio Del Toro), has been seeking redemption for his earlier sins through religion.

Their paths do not so much cross as collide, forcing each to contemplate their mortality. Life is messy, so is this raw, downbeat yet gripping movie that takes risks and isn't afraid to work the audience hard.

Brutal, adult film-making and a far better performance from Penn make 21 Grams the kind of truthful, complex film that the Oscars should reward but never do.

Updated: 15:57 Thursday, March 04, 2004