MOVIE REVIEW: 'Cold Souls'

From the Friday, Sept. 4 Oregonian....

Writer/director Sophie Barthes says the premise for "Cold Souls" came to her while she was sleeping. She dreamt that Woody Allen (in a premise right out of one of his New Yorker essays) checked into a futuristic clinic specializing in soul removal and storage. Allen's soul came out looking like a chickpea.

Incredibly, Barthes spun this into a droll little existential sci-fi comedy screenplay -- and then got Paul Giamatti to both produce the movie and step into the Woody Allen role.

In the film, Giamatti (playing himself) decides that having his soul temporarily removed will help him give a better stage performance as Uncle Vanya. (In the movie's funniest scenes, soul removal turns out to have the exact opposite effect on Mr. Giamatti's acting.) Mayhem erupts when Giamatti's soul is then stolen from cold storage and the semi-famous actor gets mixed up in the semi-illicit Russian soul-brokering market.

The movie is gorgeously shot by Barthes' partner, cinematographer Andrij Parekh, the performances are solid (I could watch Giamatti fret for hours), and the general tone is a fairly confident tightrope-walk between dry farce and existential gloom -- not bad for a writer/director feature debut. If I have one real beef with "Cold Souls," it's simply this: I don't think it digs particularly deeply into the philosophy or the unanswerable questions dredged up by its premise. This is at least partially because the "soul" is indefinable in a way that "emotions" or "memories" aren't (memories and emotions being the chief aspects of human nature explored by "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," to which "Cold Souls" will inevitably be compared).

Barthes never settles on a definition of our inner being -- how could she? But because she doesn't instead revel in the eternal question of what souls are -- beyond making them vague inner-being sources of sense memories, doubt and inspiration, as well as her movie's MacGuffin -- it's hard to understand why everyone gets so worked up about them in such specific ways. It’s entirely possible that I will decide a couple of days from now that this was Barthes' entire point. At the moment, I just think she's being a little glib, going for an easier satire of our belief that technology can solve our innermost problems.

That said, the movie still works as a clever little "Twilight Zone" episode with great production values, and it's an impressively ambitious debut for Barthes. I'd love to find out if she's descended from Roland.

_____

(101 min.; rated PG-13 for nudity and brief strong language; playing in Portland at the Fox Tower) Grade: B-minus 

'Cold Souls' (The Oregonian, Friday, Sept. 4, 2009)

Comments

[Plum]

i dunno, this movie seems alright. i think it seems like you said, not as deep and warm as eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, but then not as exciting as the matrix. no guns or aliens... i dunno if im convinced.

plum

Don't Be a Plum

[Christopher]

After watching this, I'd remembered you'd reviewed it and was curious what you had said (as I did not recall). Insightful!

I agree that the soul was left ambiguous, except that she was very clear on what you became WITHOUT a soul. You became a bit flighty, there feels (to others) like there is no "substance" behind your emotions, you just "don't get it," and you eat food like celery like a rabbit. :)