2000s SF film
Jan. 15th, 2011 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
peteryoung
Cold Souls, 2009, USA/France DIRECTED BY SOPHIE BARTHES
New York stage actor Paul Giamatti is undergoing the long dark tea-time of the soul, unable to separate himself from the angst-ridden characters he plays, so he decides to put his soul into storage and live a soulless existence. Which is fine up to a point, but after his acting suffers he then rents the soul of a dead Russian poet before wanting his own soul back, only to discover it's been traded in a soul-trafficking racket with Russia and ending up in a talentless soap-opera actress who believes she's got the soul of Al Pacino. If all this sounds very Being John Malkovich that's because it is but this film does have its own distinct origin and identity, similarly as a comedy drama but also, and trust me on this, no less scientifically rational than a film like Inception. Giamatti, playing himself, consistently delivers a schizophrenic performance with the right sympathetic tone throughout; the Russian actress Dina Korzun, as the 'mule' Nina who smuggles souls into and out of New York, gives a performance that engages the mind, and David Strathairn as the genial but flawed scientist-salesman Dr. Flintstein somehow makes everything seem perfectly normal. It's hard to believe this was a debut feature film for the French director Sophie Barthes, who turned out an off-beat and existential science fictional gem that also ends on an admirably melancholy note. Highly recommended!
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Date: 2011-01-15 05:46 pm (UTC)