From Karlovy Vary International Film Festival

While watching the European premiere of “Cold Souls,” I couldn’t help but draw parallels with a favorite of mine, the ’98 Spike Jonze Film “Being John Malkovich.” Both works are surreal, melancholic comedies that take their fantastical elements as a given; both appear to break the fourth wall by having the main character synonymous, at least in name and occupation, to the actor that plays him; both interpretively explore the elusive relationship between the body, mind and soul and between the conscious and the subconscious. Due to an ineffective literal translation, the film was even retitled into Czech as “Duše Paula Giamattiho” – “The Souls of Paul Giamatti” – perhaps the better title, as it binds the two films even closer. “Malkovich” is a superior film to “Cold Souls” in numerous thematic and cinematic facets, but in a charming, smart, occasionally stirring and oftentimes witty debut work, French writer-director Sophie Barthes has nonetheless constructed a worthy companion piece to Jonze’s own, thereby affirming herself as an up-an-coming talent to watch out for.

Set in what appears to be the modern day Manhattan, the film begins with a close-up of Paul Giamatti as… Paul Giamatti, a talented – soulful – actor approaching a nervous breakdown because of an indissoluble attachment to his characters. As his disposition disintegrates further, Giamatti decides to seek the help of an organization that casually presents itself in the telephone directory under the category “Soul Storage.” Curious, he meets with its director Dr. Flinstein (David Strathairn), and finds that the soul is actually small, perfectly material object located somewhere in the brain, and that its removal ultimately leads to some sort of a spiritual burden lifted off the shoulders. After hesitation, Giamatti signs a storage contract and goes ahead with the procedure in a futuristic chamber akin to an MRI scanner. Eventually, he is given his soul in a container, but is hesitant to look inside, and this turns out to be warranted: in size, shape and colour, it resembles a mere chickpea.

The curious premise up until this point was explained in a brief introduction by director Barthes before the film began. She stated that the idea came to her in a dream featuring “an office much like the one seen in the film”, except instead of Giamatti it was Woody Allen, one of her proclaimed inspirations, who discovered the unusual form of his soul. In the dream, Allen exclaimed in his trademark style, “More than forty films and my soul is a chickpea?”

While there is no obvious metamorphosis associated with the soul transplantations, the effects do become apparent as Giamatti loses his previous levels of empathic response. In a funny scene, he sits in a small room and is instructed to press a button of one colour whenever he “feels something” and a button of another whenever he doesn’t. A live bunny and a picture of a child produce nothing; only a naked woman manages to get a response from him. The effects of the procedure are also shown in numerous, dreamlike, out-of-focus memorial sequences that seem follow the soul bearers. Unfortunately, these scenes are inherently unclear, unexplained and largely misplaced, narratively as well stylistically.

A side effect of Giamatti’s transformation is that he begins to have trouble with his occupation, producing a rather erratic, but very amusing, interpretation of a character in Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya.”  This leads him to come back to Flinstein and agree to be temporarily implanted with the soul of a Russian poet, obtained from a St. Petersburg-based organization that can best be described as the black market counterpart of the soul trade. Barthes’ personal acquaintance with and admiration of Russian culture becomes clearer as initial references to the play are complemented with a plenitude of Russian actors, settings and other nuances that gradually appear throughout the film.

As part of the second subplot, a Russian mule, Nina, played by actress Duna Korzun, works for the organization as a means of buying and then “trafficking” souls of various figures to Flinstein’s office where clients can chose them from a catalog for transplantation. The central situation complicates when Nina is instructed to steal a soul of a U.S. actor back to Russia upon the request of her manager Dmitri in order to help his trophy wife Sveta (Katheryn Winnick) with her own acting career. The subject of the transfer happens to be Giamatti, and this is where they cross paths, even though Sveta is led to believe the soul belongs to Al Pacino.

Most of the Russian characters in the film are played by Russian actors and speak the language in a refreshingly genuine manner, except Winnick, who has a rather thick accent in comparison with her colleagues. The Russian-speaking sequences are subtitled, and always authentically, except for one discrepancy I managed to catch, when the spoken line “Size doesn’t matter” was translated to “Al Pacino won an Oscar”, which admittedly means the same thing.

The splendid Paul Giamatti, one of today’s foremost character actors, delivers a pitch-perfect, bittersweet performance as himself and nails the subtle transformations of his character with each different soul, or lack thereof. Strathairn and Korzun both play their characters in a nicely toned and measured manner that commendably avoids superfluous sentimentality. Supporting cast is merely adequate, but not much is required of them in the first place.

Technically, the film is very well constructed, especially for a first effort. Anrij Parekh’s cinematography and Andrew Mondshein’s editing are fluid and sensible, and the cool color tones do a service to the film and do justice to its title. In effective framing, Barthes already demonstrates a very good eye for visual streamline and the auteuristic touches reminiscent of that of an experienced director.

Without giving too much away, one area where Jonze’s film surpasses Barthes’ is in the dénouement, which was much less grandiose and thematically potent and satisfying in “Cold Souls.” Also the writer of the film, Barthes miscalculates the narrative at this point, assuming that quickly tying all the remaining knots in the story automatically paves way for a clinching finale. This is not the case, and the only indications of culmination are an extreme long shot and a fade-out, a bit upsetting considering that the film is compact in running length (approximately 100 minutes) and could have been expanded.

Au contraire, Barthes’ film surpasses Jonze’s in the nature of the characters, which seem, as a whole, more down-to-earth and emotionally resonant.

Otherwise, the narrative structure is solid and the screenplay manages to balance the two subplots very well, never losing track of the significance of Giamatti’s character while giving the others ample time for development. The astute screenplay is filled with (Charlie) Kaufman-esque wit and has elements of metaphysical insight to boot. While it does little to truly, rhetorically challenge the mind outside of the thematic age-old speculation between body and soul, it always appreciates the audience as a group of thinking individuals and never faces silliness or outlandishness outside of the movie’s settled internal logic.

Thus far, the movie has won a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize in the Sundance Film Festival and Giamatti was deservedly given the Best Actor Award in Karlovy Vary. All in all, the pleasant film, both to the eyes and the mind, deserves much more than a limited release later this year; the film and all its comedic touches resonated very well with the festival crowd and I predict would do so in equal measure in multiplexes. As a welcome diversion from the recent vulgar comedies that have been flooding the market, notably of the teenage or sexual or romantic denominations, I highly recommend this soulful, engrossing effort by a very promising madame.

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