Cold Souls

In trying to catch up with current releases, I feel as if I'm on two tracks---one for the mainstream Hollywood movies, and the other for the indie releases. The latter are somewhat harder in that they often play only in arthouses, and stay only for a week or two before the print gets shipped out to the next arthouse.

Very quickly I noticed that the two northern Colorado arthouses---the Lyric Cafe Cinema in Fort Collins and the Kress Lounge in Greeley---tend to trade prints. That is, if a movie is showing at the Lyric, it will often move over to the Kress afterwards, and vice versa. This allowed me to be a little lazier than I would have otherwise been, a year ago, when we only had the Lyric.

Cold Souls had been showing in the Lyric when I got back into town, so of course I waited until it migrated over to the Kress (which I visited two weeks ago and liked very much). Of course I waited until late in the week, until I found out that it had only two days left. I combined this with the trip to the Greeley Mall to see Pandorum to make it a two-fer in Greeley on Wednesday.

Cold Souls turns out to be a fun movie with an original concept that kept my interest throughout. I recommend it for everyone.

It stars Paul Giamatti as a fictionalized version of himself. At beginning of the story, he is struggling through a rehearsal as the title character in an off-Broadway production of Uncle Vanya by Chekhov.

The Russian aspect here is important. Much of the movie actually takes place in, and was shot in, St. Petersburg. It's almost as if this is an absurdist and self-aware adaptation of Chekhov, using the play as a starting place for telling a modern science fiction story that attempts to convey the sentiment of 19th Century Russia.

And indeed it is absurd. Paul, weighed down by his soul, discovers that there is a business in Manhattan that will extract one's soul and store it in a secure vault. Moreover, one can "rent" souls, having them temporarily installed inside your body. It turns out many of these rented souls are from a black market that goes back to Russia. Russian souls, it seems, are in demand.

My favorite line of the movie is when one of the Russian black marketeers suggests selling American souls to Russians. "Who would want an American soul?" I burst out laughing in the theater.

Underneath all this absurdity is fairly standard structure that makes the movie work in an emotional sense. To wit, the tension of the narrative arises in part from the fact that Paul keeps all this soul-exhanging a secret from his wife. This leads to a husband-wife breach. To heal the breach, and resolve the narrative, Paul must come clean with wife and reconnect with her.

But you wouldn't even notice this unless you're a Classicist like me, looking for such things. Movies like this work well when the absurd comedy is on the surface, and such themes are woven in seemlessly so that they seem just a natural part of the story.