"Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train" is not a highlight in Australian cinema; it is a slice-of-life art film with political overtones that is artificial, contrived and goes quickly awry after a provocative beginning.

Wendy Hughes stars as an art teacher in a parochial school who moonlights on weekends as a $250-a-night prostitute on a passenger train. She has a good reason for doing it, of course — her wheelchair-bound brother is addicted to morphine and she needs the money to buy it for him.

So each weekend she takes an overnight train, arranges for a private coach and picks up a different man in the club car. She leads them on with conversation, subtly seducing them and eventually leading them to her coach, advising, "It'll cost you." None of her customers seems to mind, and all have a hefty pocketful of cash. Her clientele include a rugby coach, a young soldier, a retired businessman whose wife has recently died, a priest and an over-the-hill rock star.

Using wigs, Hughes becomes a different person for each one and then orders them to leave her coach by 3 a.m.

One night she finds herself seduced by enigmatic Colin Friels. And once she's fallen in love with him he offers her a moneymaking proposition that will give her enough money to take care of her brother and quit her weekend racket . . . but it involves political assassination. He also promises to stay with her when it's all over. Uh-huh.

"Strangers on a Train" by way of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar."

Unfortunately, the film is so much drivel, with elaborate, quizzical conversations between the brooding principals, conversations that are supposed to be terribly deep and meaningful but which are instead deadly dull and without a modicum of substance.

"Warm Nights on a Slow Moving Train" can, just like the title implies, lull you to sleep rather quickly. And it may remind you of some movies made in the '60s that were boring treatises on life but often hailed by critics as high art.

It is unrated but deserves a probable R for considerable sexual activity and a bit of partial nudity.