18-year-old Nathalie (the elfin Marie Gillain) lives with boyfriend Eric (Olivier Sitruk) and his best pal, the surly, dim-witted Bruno (Bruno Putzulu). By day she's a shopgirl-model, by night chats up rich men in a local bar. The boys do nothing but watch De Palma's garish, coked-up Scarface. Putting two and two together - their gun and Nathalie's address-book - the boys will rob the producers and lawyers she baits to bankroll their pipedream of going into business in the States.

The Bait has an amorality far more shocking than the faked-up controversy of a Natural Born Killers. It's the flip of the ennui in Rochant's World Without Pity, the seduction of middle-class Parisian youth by ubiquitous US culture. Escape lives at the end of a gun, but Eric and Bruno are cack-handed armed robbers. Their first victim has to die because of their incompetence, the decision to execute the second never even debated as they share out his expensive Christmas presents.

Tavernier takes on board Hitchcock's maxim about killing being very difficult and taking a very long time. The two heists in here are long, painful expositions of youthful bravado over common sense; all catchphrases and half-remembered Pacino-gestures. The film shares something with other recent murderous youths - Heavenly Creatures, Fun, the undervalued Butterfly Kiss - but at least there we could find sympathies, motivations. The blank-eye callousness of this not particularly disadvantaged trio belongs only to its own avaricious self.

Despite some initial reluctance to acknowledge the physics of killing, it quickly becomes ugly but pragmatic: Eric would rather stab a man 12 times than use the gun. That it happens off-screen doesn't help. Bruno soaking the blood off his jeans in the bidet has more to say about contemporary violence than a garage-load of Tarantinoed corpses. Gillain is alluring but naive enough to make this work, a child using her adult body as a tantalising toy. She ups her Walkman (Us 3, Inner City, Soul II Soul) when the screaming starts. Sitruk and Putzulu, with a crackling, unspoken homoerotic undertone, exude the sure-footed cockiness that can only derive from almost total ignorance.

This is potent stuff, powerfully performed and strikingly shot by Alain Choquart. The bleakness of the message is never reflected in its telling as with the same director's desultory police-procedural L.627. If Tavernier is pushing a soft-Left agenda here - that French youth is still in the disturbing thrall of America - then, hell, if it comes down to a straight fight in the end between Lenny Kravitiz and Stereolab on the soundtrack, it's hard to pick a fight with his argument.