Messing With Souls
by Chris Knipp

The high-concept premise of French writer-director Sophie Barthes's first feature Cold Souls is that the soul is not only a physical organ, but can be switched, by entering a chamber as for an MRI, from person to person. The film opens with Descartes' statement that this organ is located in the pineal gland, though references to historical concepts of the soul end there. Barthes' whimsical, surreal premise is that thanks to modern technology, one can be soulless, or rent the soul of another. In Cold Souls' modern-day New York, there's now a place to go to have all this done.

Up to a point in this beautifully photographed film, Barthes delights and entertains with her story, which, due to casting, turns into a glorious field for Paul Giamatti to romp in. He does his trademark schlemiel shtick to perfection as the protagonist, an actor whose difficulty developing an interpretation of the title role in Chekhov's Uncle Vanya leads him, tipped off by his agent and a New Yorker article, first to get rid of his soul, then to demand it back. Paul has felt too heavy. But then he feels too light. Nothing works. What a terrible mistake he's made!

The trouble with a perfect vehicle like this, however, is that the performance tends to overwhelm the vehicle. The movie, whose tone is a little mixed, has a slight story that doesn't ultimately go anywhere but back and forth within its tight limits. It's got laughs, especially early on when the premise is being presented and reveled in. Then it develops a surprising darker underside -- another, more hauntingly atmospheric shadow story that unfolds as the scene shifts from posh parts of Manhattan to Russia, where a more devious and sweatier trade in souls is going on involving desperate people and a rich gangster (Sergey Kolesnikov) with a preening girlfriend (Katheryn Winnick).

The Russian trail might have been a good moment to make some jokes about Gogol's Dead Souls, but the film unfortunately chooses to skip over the vast literature on this mysterious concept. Why, or what, souls are, we do not learn. Puzzlement is even expressed about what happens to them when people die -- as if even that had been forgotten. Paul Giamatti's character, who, because this is a Charlie Kaufman knockoff, is called "Paul Giamatti," is almost good enough to be a Gogol character. His life is a Kafkaesque comedy. The clinic he goes to is run by a certain bland but somewhat suspect Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn). When Paul's soul is extracted it turns out, to his embarrassment, to look exactly like a chickpea (not all souls look alike). It's placed in a glass jar and locked away in a deposit box. Dr. Flintstein tells him it can also be "stored in our New Jersey warehouse," if he likes. When Paul returns to his life and feels nothing, that's even worse for his acting than his previous heaviness. It also ruins things with his polite but disappointed wife Claire (Emily Watson), who doesn't recognize him any more.

When Giamatti squawks and grumbles and crumbles he delivers schlemiel arias that are fun, but tend to override the story. This is a great role for him, but the kvetching meant more in American Splendor and Sideways, where it had a larger context than a few short scenes with Emily Watson and some rehearsals of Vanya in various keys. With his own soul lost or misplaced, he rents the soul of "a Russian poet," and things go quite well, till this soul becomes too much for him to handle.

The sheer absurdity of the premise is taken for a good ride. Soul extraction comes to seem just one of those elective surgical procedures the well-off get themselves into. "Paul Giamatti" is, appropriately, a famous actor, though unknown in Russia. But the darker side, though not much explored, is a clear allusion to organ-trafficking. Needless to say, this is heavy stuff for comedy, and at this point the movie shifts to something more like a surreal thriller. We're more in Dirty Pretty Things, Maria Full of Grace, or demonlover territory. The movie has turned losing one's soul into a Kafkaesque nightmare, but an all-white, posh, air-conditioned, and giddily funny one. In Russia, it becomes pleasingly dark but no longer funny.

For the Russian side, other characters emerge, notably Nina (Dina Korzun of Forty Shades of Blue), a "mule" who moves souls back and forth between Russia and New York. A bleach blond with long bangs, she's elegant and suave, but dangerously overworked. She's accumulating a potentially toxic residue of leftover bits from other people's souls, and there may not be room for her own soul anymore. Nina may remind us of Lorna, the young Albanian woman in the Dardenne brothers' new film. Later the rich Russian gangster is added to the mix. His girlfriend, a would-be actress, has had her soul replaced with what she is told is Al Pacino's. (Silly, of course, but she and Dimitri, the gangster, are nonetheless hostile and menacing.) There are a couple of poor Russian women thrown in for flavor, but even they are rather glamorous. The Russian woman poet, whose soul Giamatti winds up with for a while, has a certain morbid chic. It all ends in a beautiful long shot on a beach. (Perhaps a whole new meaning has been given to the phrase "soul mates.") This is radical soul chic, and we didn't even dream that was possible! But nowadays, mightn't it be posh just to have a soul? And does this movie itself even have one? It forgets it was a comedy, without remembering what a soul is.

©2009 Chris Knipp
CineScene