Out of Frame: Cold Souls
What's the best way to deal with those especially dark nights of the soul? Get rid of the soul, of course. That's the premise of French filmmaker Sophie Barthes' debut feature, a surreal blend of witty comedy and reflective — please excuse the expression — soul searching.
Except in this case, the soul-searching isn't just figurative. A soul has gone missing, and its owner, actor Paul Giamatti (playing actor Paul Giamatti) needs to get it back. Giamatti has enlisted the services of a business called The Soul Storage Company on the advice of his agent, after finding himself nearing a nervous breakdown over the emotional rigors of a production of Chekov's Uncle Vanya, in which he is playing the title role. SSC has developed a technology that is able to distill the soul into a physical form and extract as much as 95 percent of it from the body, leaving only a residual trace. Barthes trusts that a nebulous explanation of the process and enough futuristic equipment will be enough to sell the necessary suspension of disbelief. And she's right.
What Giamatti discovers is that being without his soul isn't quite the carefree experience all the smiling endorsements in the testimonial video made it out to be. "Soullessness," his extraction consultant Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) explains to him, "has its own peculiarities." Unfortunately, the cold storage locker with Giamatti's jar is empty, the contents off to St. Petersburg, sold on the black market to a Russian soap actress under the impression she's trying on Al Pacino's soul for size.
It sounds like a lost Charlie Kaufman plot, but Barthes distinguishes herself by making it nothing like a Kaufman movie. Barthes has a tendency toward sweet melancholy that contrasts the bitter cynicism of Kaufman. They're both dark, but Barthes' film is consistently warm, even when the plot takes it to the ice-choked shores of Russia's Neva Bay. It's here that Giamatti is brought by Nina (Dina Korzun), a Russian woman employed as a "mule" in the international soul trade, taking on souls (which become volatile if transported at high altitude in their extracted form) for transport overseas. And even when everything goes haywire in the third act, which is somewhat problematic here as it is in Kaufman's work, Barthes never lets the movie gallop out of control. The inherent sweetness of the bond between Paul and Nina — she has carried his soul, and out of curiosity, looked into it more deeply than even he has — grounds the film like the calm eye of a hurricane.
The success or failure of the movie hinges on Giamatti's performance, and he delivers one of the finest of his career. Yes, he's technically playing himself, but not really, which surely makes the choices any actor faces in taking on a role even more difficult and confusing than they normally might be. Emily Watson is not, in reality, his beautiful wife, and this New York brownstone is not his beautiful house. And one suspects that if the real Paul Giamatti was nearly as neurotic as this one, he'd never have been able to take on the role to begin with.
As it is though, the actor plays himself — Barthes' imagined version of him — masterfully. How does he appear to outside observers when lacking a soul? Giamatti inverts the natural expressiveness of his eyes into dull lifelessness. He uses the thick beard he wears to his advantage, his mouth disappearing behind a veil of whiskers and making his face into a blank slate. And when he goes back to the rehearsals for Vanya, we make a startling and hilarious discovery: being without a soul causes one to act exactly like William Shatner. After watching one scene of Giamatti-as-Shatner-as-Vanya, I'd happily pay good money to see the full version.
Barthes displays a remarkable talent for such moments of inspired comedic lunacy, as well as some great one liners. "How did we get to this point?" asks a horrified (but morbidly curious) Giamatti in one scene, as he looks over a series of jars containing souls of various shapes, sizes, consistencies, and colors. Dr. Flintstein looks at his handiwork with pride, and replies, "Progress!" But if that was all Cold Souls had going for it, it would be a rather, um, soulless exercise.
What truly distinguishes the film is Barthes' penchant for mood, both in her characters, and in the visuals that wordlessly reflect their inner lives. Gauzy, hallucinogenic sequences mark looks inside the soul, containing just enough information to be useful to the viewer, but never descending into self-conscious and easy film school symbology. The director is interested in examining what the soul really is by musing on not only what we'd be like without them, but also what we'd be like if we tried on the souls of others, and retained little pieces of them every time we went through the process. What does a patchwork soul constructed out of leftovers do to a person? Barth never arrives at anything approximating an answer to these queries, but sometimes questioning itself is most rewarding. Barthes boldly decides to leave most of the film's narrative threads unresolved, leaving us not only with an image of heartbreakingly quiet beauty, but plenty of questions to gnaw at our own souls in the aftermath.
Cold Souls opens today at E Street and Shirlington.