I write this as I blithely ignore month-old emails from friends and associates. Since the premiere of Around the Bay, I feel I've been extracted from the usual substance of my life, like the pit of a fruit cut out and set aside. Something along the way--the lopsided screenings and incommensurate press bonanza, the time spent, the money spent, my mind and body spent, wife and children neglected--has set me adrift. I feel a sudden profound anonymity, reminiscent of the sensation I had while living in my van in Houston, showering at the gym, and writing novels in the projection booth of the megaplex where I worked. Projectionism and homelessness? Double portions of darkness, obscurity, personal and cultural alienation, invisibility, lurkiness, disembodiment (communicating with one's co-workers by radio). Hiding isn't really the point if one is already invisible. And now, perhaps, we are sensing the origin of Carla's recondite role in Canary, though it has been distorted through the lens of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, which contains the perfect nauseating metaphor for the spiritual corruption of loneliness.

When I think about Canary in the abstract, I think of Celine and Julie Go Boating, a long film which meanders to bewitching rhythms. The cinema mobilized to purvey metaphors for cinema--a stagnant genre to which Canary will at least partially belong. The inexplicable "invisibility" of Carla in Canary bears some resemblance to the shenanigans of the eponymous characters in Celine and Julie. (This train of thought leads me to wonder how many sci-fi/dystopian works have gentler undertones of magical realism. Sci-fi is usually sharply divorced from present realities; dystopian fantasy uses present reality as a springboard for its prophetic working out of current social trends; and magical realism tends to be very close to the reality we recognize with a few precise imaginative flourishes and little interest in political or social commentary. Sci-fi and dystopian works usually take great pains to explain "how things got this way," whereas magical realism doesn't care to interrogate its own flights of fancy--thus the former can become intellectually overwrought while the latter remains aloof and intuitive, self-sustaining [Philip K. Dick seemed to straddle this line with a certain amount of unclassifiable genius]. As it happens, Canary tends toward the inward-lookingness of magical realism despite its dystopian DNA. However, as if in an abortive attempt to execute the appropriate genre conventions, there is a subplot in which an earnest truth-seeker [i.e., a journalist] ineffectively investigates "organ failure." Of course, only by flirting with such tropes can a work fully expurgate them. Failure to refer to these conventions suggests that they have been forgotten, left out, when in fact they have been rejected, kicked out. It's better to show them walking away with their tails between their legs than not to show them at all.)

There are more obvious parallels between Canary and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which is a strong candidate for my favorite film of the past five years. There has never been anything else quite like it. Lazarescu has something Altman always aimed for but never achieved: a hive of characters who suggest depth at a glance. For better or worse, Altman's elegant panning zooms, intricately choreographed action, mannered monotonous dialogue, and droll one-liners result in something as smooth and impenetrable as polished granite (as Ava Gardner said, "Deep down, I'm pretty superficial"). Technically speaking, the ruse of "going nowhere" plays much better under the gruff, utilitarian long takes of Puiu--this way he reconstitutes the vitality of the ensemble piece, which Altman had infected with smug, falsely sophisticated enervation. As for storytelling and character development, the laconic, inconclusive sprawl which results from Altman's methods--Sutherland and Gould tried to have him fired for under-directing them in M.A.S.H.--is one-upped by Lazarescu's far more enigmatic sprawl and drier dryness. We are offered almost nothing of interest in each of these gray Romanian medicos but his or her sheer screen time--and there is just enough of that to go around for colorful bit roles that somehow we feel bereft when the "main action" (ahem) takes us away from, say, the weasely gum-smacking radiologist whose brainscan jockeying and punny commentary are somehow inflammatorily apathetic and incongruously humane. For all its unconventionality, the film’s most delightfully exploited taboo is the realization of Lazarescu himself as a nearly speechless, inert "protagonist" around whom things occur (sounds a bit like Carla's role, you say?). Lazarescu is hard to care about; his behavior is obscure; he is without recognizable characteristics which might generate audience sympathy (being "old and sick," like Umberto D, is not the sufficient makings of a person but only of a politically-charged stereotype); mentions of far-flung family members dangle like empty pinatas, eventually taking on the color of a Romanian inside joke rather than what we would normally consider explication or character development. Somehow the film glides along despite the burden of a title character who refuses to carry it. In an age of ubiquitous TV close-ups, this is a film shot almost exclusively in masters and mediums, a film in which actors make impressions by whatever physical characteristics are most obvious from a distance--"the woman with short blonde hair," "the guy with the beard." We aren't permitted to look into a woman's eyes and fathom her dismay, which reminds us that one of many ways in which a director may evade sentimentality is by relying on masters and mediums. On top of every other "mistake," The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is inadvisably long (masterfully bewitching rhythms) and anti-climactic to its bones. But, most impressively, it handles cascading tone problems with unlikely grace, which gives me hope for the incessantly vacillating tones of Canary.

And speaking of Canary, it seems I've found some high-flown ways to avoid saying, "This thing is a mess." The rough cut will play like a television miniseries (yet another reference point: von Trier's The Kingdom). Each episode is perversely involving and resists truncation. I work eight hours on one scene and feel proud of myself for getting it down to 41 minutes. But none of it makes any sense, and I'm ridiculously proud of that.