Martin Provost’s Séraphine, from a screenplay (in French with English subtitles) by Mr. Provost and Marc Abdenour, tells the remarkable real-life story of Séraphine de Senlis, a 48-year-old chaste housekeeper whose naïve, brightly colored, still-life paintings were eventually recognized and celebrated by art museums in France and around the world. Her work was first discovered in 1913 by a German art critic, Wilhelm Uhde, who was the first person to appreciate and purchase the paintings of Pablo Picasso. He was also the discoverer of the eventually famous primitive painter Le Douanier Rousseau. As it happened, Uhde had rented an apartment in Senlis in order to write and take a break from his hectic life in Paris. In the course of his settling in Senlis, he hired a cleaning lady, the aforementioned Séraphine. While visiting the home of a prominent local family, he noticed a small painting on wood. The local people scoffed at the idea of a menial servant painting anything of artistic value. But they had also scoffed earlier at Picasso and Braque, two of Uhde’s intimate friends.

Séraphine is played by Yolande Moreau, one of the great screen actresses of our time, whom I first marveled at in 2004 when she appeared in When the Sea Rises, a film she also wrote and directed. Ms. Moreau has also graced us with her talents in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001), Dominique Cabrera’s The Milk of Human Kindness (2001), Bénédicte Liénard’s A Piece of Sky (2002), Francis Palluau’s Welcome to the Roses (2003), Costa Gavras’ The Axe (2005), Albert Dupontel’s Locked Out (2006) and Catherine Breillat’s The Last Mistress (2007), among several of her performances that have not been widely distributed in the U.S. One would hope that her total filmography would one day form the inspiration for a complete retrospective of her glorious work.

Ulrich Tukur plays her discoverer and patron, Wilhelm Uhde, with authority and conviction. Yet, though Séraphine’s art has been finally vindicated, her life was full of frustration and heartbreak, and there were so many lapses of Uhde’s loyalty to her that the narrative becomes one of the saddest I have seen on the screen. If, indeed, the two leads had not been so supremely gifted, I would have had an easier time dismissing the film as a failed foray into art appreciation.

Of course, Séraphine and Uhde had the rare bad fortune of the outbreak of the First World War, forcing Uhde to flee for his life as a German alien caught in the maelstrom of Hun-hating Frenchmen; and then the worldwide Great Depression in the 1930s compelled Uhde to cancel his financially ambitious plans to showcase Séraphine’s art for French spectators. As a direct consequence of what Séraphine interpreted as Uhde’s betrayal, she went mad, and she was placed in an asylum in 1932, and died there in 1942.

Mr. Provost has directed the incidents forming the conjoined destinies of Seraphine and Uhde as a stylized series of brief, artfully constructed and carefully framed interludes mostly depicting the world of nature, from which Séraphine drew her inspiration and consolation. The film is a commendably worthy endeavor, and I am almost ashamed that my ingrained hedonistic attitude toward movies prevents me from recommending Séraphine more enthusiastically.

asarris@observer.com

Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, from his own screenplay (partially in Spanish with English subtitles), conveys a sense of his own life and career convulsing wildly between fulfillment and tragedy, triumph and debacle. Now 70, Mr. Coppola can look back on an existence drenched with family feelings and vague guilt complexes. These he has expanded and wildly overdramatized in an independent low-budget feature shot on location in the most picturesque and art-drenched neighborhoods in Buenos Aires. He has filmed the present-day scenes in highly contrasted black-and-white, influenced by such B&W classicists as Akira Kurosawa, Michelangelo Antonioni, Elia Kazan and Robert Bresson. For scenes set in the past or as fantasies, he turned to the vivid color palette of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, represented by extensive footage from The Red Shoes (1948) and The Tales of Hoffman (1951). The narrative of two brothers in conflict is suggested by Rumble Fish (1983), which Mr. Coppola adapted from one of S. E. Hinton’s series of young adult novels, with Matt Dillon living in the shadow of older brother Mickey Rourke.

In Tetro, Vincent Gallo plays the title character, the older brother of 18-year-old Aiden Ehrenrich’s younger brother, Bennie. The film begins with Bennie as he arrives in Argentina from the U.S. on a cruise ship on which he worked as a waiter. We soon learn that Bennie is in search of his estranged older brother, who had left his family in the U.S. 11 years before, without a word of explanation. When Bennie finally locates Tetro’s house, he is welcomed very warmly by Tetro’s girlfriend, Miranda (Maribel Verdu), but Tetro himself at first refuses to leave his room to greet Bennie. When he finally does, he advises Bennie to return home as soon as possible. Tetro also refuses to answer Bennie’s plaintive queries as to why, in effect, he abandoned his younger brother. Tetro angrily refuses to discuss the subject. And so it goes, on and on, for an inordinate length of time—Bennie beseeching, Tetro turning away.

In the meantime, Miranda tries her best to bring the two brothers together, without any success. Finally, with Miranda’s help, Bennie gains access to Tetro’s hidden hoard of writings and secrets, and sets out to write his own musical play on what he has discovered. Bennie’s writing, in unwilling collaboration with Tetro, attracts the attention of a very influential critic named Alone (Carmen Maura), who awards Bennie and Tetro the Patagonian Festival Prize, at which ceremony all the family secrets come tumbling out. I would be a spoilsport indeed to reveal them.

Klaus Maria Brandauer’s Carlo appears only in the multicolored past as a disreputable parental figure for Tetro and Bennie. Tetro has already been compelled to relive a traumatic car accident, in which he, the driver, survived, and his and Bennie’s mother, sitting next to him, was killed. Mr. Brandauer’s Carlo is a world-renowned orchestra conductor, and bears a superficial resemblance to Mr. Coppola’s own father, Carmine Coppola, the first flute of Alfredo Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra, and a composer for several of Mr. Coppola’s film projects. In interviews, Mr. Coppola has insisted that his father has always been a supportive presence in his life, and that therefore there is no resemblance between his own benign father and Mr. Brandauer’s coldly, cruelly manipulative Carlo. Still, one may be left to wonder from what source Tetro’s and Mr. Coppola’s overpowering rage toward a father figure originated. Of course, Mr. Gallo’s Tetro delivers much of the actor’s own ever-sour expressions of disgust over a world of unexplained grievances. Mr. Gallo’s own films, Buffalo 66 (1998) and The Brown Bunny (2004), the latter having scandalized Cannes with its notorious fellatio sequence with Chloë Sevigny, project enough angst on their own to supplement Mr. Coppola’s.

Still, despite all its longueurs and extreme aggravations, Tetro deserves to be seen as the late work of one of the cinema’s most accomplished masters of mise-en-scène.

Megumi Sasaki’s Herb & Dorothy describes and amply illustrates the extraordinary saga of the Vogels—Herbert, a postal clerk, and Dorothy, a librarian—who double-handedly built one of the most important collections of Minimalist and Conceptual Art in history with their very modest salaries, beginning in the early ’60s and continuing to this day. By mutual agreement, Herb’s salary was devoted entirely to purchasing the artwork; Dorothy’s paycheck alone paid for all their other living expenses. Furthermore, the pieces had to be small enough to fit into their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. At the time, not much attention was paid to the art movements that followed Abstract Expressionism, which was why the farsighted curatorial team of Herb and Dorothy were able to afford so many pieces that would eventually become art treasures. Among many of their early discoveries who went on to become world-renowned masters were Sol LeWitt, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Richard Tuttle, Chuck Close, Robert and Sylvia Mangold, Lynda Benglis, Pat Steir, Robert Barry, Lucio Pozzi and Laurence Weiner.

After 30 years of discerning, collecting and buying, the Vogel consortium accumulated over 2,000 pieces, filling every corner of their tiny one-bedroom domicile. “Not even a toothpick could be squeezed into the apartment,” recalls Dorothy. Hence, the Vogels decided in 1992 to donate their entire collection to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Most of the pieces in the collection were given as a gift to the institution. Over the years, many of the pieces had risen so much in value that their collection today is worth millions of dollars. What is truly amazing, especially in this age of Ponzi schemes and the misappropriation of people’s life savings, is the fact that Herb and Dorothy have never sold a single piece in their collection. Today they still live in the same apartment in New York with 19 turtles, lots of fish and one cat. They’ve refilled the place with pieces of new art.

asarris@observer.com

Yojiro Takita’s Departures (Okuribito), from the screenplay (in Japanese with English subtitles) by Kundo Kuyama, won last year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in an upset victory in this category over the co-favorites, the Israeli-made Waltz With Bashir and the French-made The Class. In fact, the director was so surprised by his film’s winning of the Oscar that he took too long to get to the stage to say much more than “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” The only review I read before seeing the movie ridiculed the Academy members for their elderly sentimentality. Yet, quite simply, and elderly as I am, I regard Departures as the most moving film I have ever seen commemorating the bonds between the living and the dead.

The convoluted narrative structure of the film allows its protagonist, Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), to introduce himself to us a few months after a big change in his life. He recalls playing the cello for a Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in a half-empty auditorium. At the conclusion of the concert, the orchestra’s impresario announces that the company is being disbanded. Daigo is so disheartened by the loss of his position that he abandons his dreams of becoming a renowned cello soloist, and decides to return with his reluctant wife, Mika (Ryoko Hirosue), to his hometown in the northeastern prefecture of Yamagata, and to the home of his late mother, which she’s left him in her will. We learn later that this house had doubled as the local pub until his bartending father abandoned the family when Daigo was only 5. For his part, Daigo has always regretted being too wrapped up in his musical career in Tokyo to attend his mother’s funeral, especially after she tirelessly promoted Daigo and his musical prospects after her husband deserted them.

Back in Yamagata, when Daigo answers a help-wanted ad with the one-word description, “Departures,” he mistakenly assumes that the position has something to do with tourism. He is startled to discover that the job is concerned instead with the “Departed”—the result of a typographical error in the ad. The company owner, Sasaki (Tsutomu Yamazaki), explains the post as one of “encoffination” of corpses in front of their families prior to cremation, and Daigo is at first horrified. But Sasaki’s immediate and substantial cash payment for a trial period persuades Daigo to accept the position despite his misgivings. Sasaki explains that he is getting older, and needs someone to carry on the tradition.

Daigo’s first encounter with a corpse turns into a stomach-turning fiasco. Unfazed, Sasaki instructs Daigo to take the rest of the day off. Daigo takes the opportunity to visit a community bath operated by the mother of his closest school friend. When Daigo finally goes home, he tells Mika that he has gotten a job to pay their bills without revealing its embarrassing nature. And he continues his deception in the weeks that follow.

Meanwhile, Daigo has begun to appreciate the depth and intensity of feelings the ceremony arouses in the families of the deceased. Ironically, Mr. Takita launched his directorial career as a maker of “pink,” or semi-pornographic, Japanese films, but Departures is scrupulously chaste in the “encoffination” procedure that keeps the subject’s flesh from ever being exposed to the view of the family.

When Mika discovers the true nature of Daigo’s employment, she leaves him for a time and returns to Tokyo. She returns reluctantly only after she discovers that she is pregnant. She would still prefer that he give up his job, but he remains adamant on that issue even though he is overjoyed to have her back.

When Mika is persuaded to attend an encoffination ceremony after the sudden death of Daigo’s onetime best friend’s mother, she realizes for the first time the invaluable contribution Daigo’s ceremonial reverence makes in the community by bringing a measure of consolation to the bereaved families.

Daigo’s final ordeal is his being shamed by Mika into performing the encoffination of his suddenly and unexpectedly reappearing late father, whom Daigo had spent his life hating for having deserted him and his mother. The ultimate beauty of the film rests in its symbolic details that bridge the abyss between the living and the dead. As the French might say, it is to make one cry.

asarris@observer.com

McG’s Terminator Salvation, from a story and screenplay by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, stipulates a post-nuclearized, post-apocalyptic America in the year 2018. Yes, 2018! That’s only nine years from now! I may actually live that long. And for what? As the elliptically named director McG, tells us in the movie’s  production notes: “We’re telling the story of the becoming of John Connor, the becoming of Kyle Reese, the strengthening of Skynet, and where our humanity lies. This is the moment when humanity takes a stand against the machines.”

I have quoted this passage only to inform my readers that it makes very little sense to me even after seeing Terminator Salvation. The problem may be the result of my never having become addicted to the Terminator series James Cameron initiated in 1984 with The Terminator, which he eventually followed seven years later with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. All I retained from these first two Terminator films was the serio-comic image of Arnold Schwarzenegger with machine-made muscles. I didn’t pick up on all the intricate time-travel subplots in which characters from the future send terminators back into the present to make sure that they are born, and that they are enabled to mature into the future. Hence, all the palaver in McG’s synopsis about this character “becoming” and that character “becoming.”

As it happens, I never did get to see Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. By this time, Mr. Cameron had become a master of the universe with the global success of Titanic (1997), and had presumably outgrown the Terminator series. The point is that co-screenwriters Mr. Brancato and Mr. Ferris, who wrote the screenplay for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which posited the nuclear apocalypse that John Connor and his mother, Sarah, had spent their lives trying to prevent, have now written the story and screenplay for Terminator Salvation. In so doing, they have created a new character named Marcus Wright and played by Sam Worthington. We first meet Marcus on death row, calmly facing execution for an unspecified crime, being visited by a strange woman, Helena Bonham Carter’s Dr. Serena Kogan, who thanks him for donating his body for some valuable and again unspecified experiment. The execution takes place with a set of lethal needles, but the next thing we know, Marcus is seemingly reborn, and embarked on a mission he doesn’t understand.

Meanwhile, a decisive battle is looming between the forces of the human survivors, led at first by General Ashdown (Michael Ironside), and the machines, led by a nebulous organization known as Skynet. I say nebulous because the only identifiable acting entity speaking for Skynet is Ms. Bonham Carter’s Dr. Kogan. McG has dedicated the film to the recently deceased Stan Winston (1946–2008), who designed the original Terminator robot and all its subsequent variations. He won Best Visual Effects Oscars for James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Indeed, Winston’s machines are something to behold, though not entirely to believe, even in this age of robotic devices to clear mines and drop bombs on the Taliban without causing American military casualties. The imagined fear that these mechanisms will turn on us is part of the sci-fi fantasy world created with films like Terminator Salvation. I suppose it is a way of escaping our more strongly based fears of a total financial collapse, and an endless series of wars against an infinite variety of insurgencies.

The character of John Connor, humanity’s projected savior, was played previously in his various stages of maturity by Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl. For the current version, set 14 years after the nuclear apocalypse, Christian Bale was cast, and he is very effective in the role, as is Mr. Worthington in the role of Marcus, whom John Connor is not sure whether to trust as humanity’s ally, or to suspect as a spy from Skynet sent to infiltrate the human survivors’ base of operations.

Of course, the varied intrigues cannot be resolved one way or another in view of the needed justification for still another sequel of robotophobia, a sequel that I promise myself I will try to avoid. Nonetheless, I cannot completely condemn a movie that has been very competently written, directed and acted, any more than I can blame Mr. Schwarzenegger for all the woes he has encountered while trying to govern California.

asarris@observer.com

Wendy Keys’ Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight unfolds as a labor of love and mutual respect between Ms. Keys and Mr. Glaser, onetime colleagues in the early ’70s on the Board of Directors of the International Design Conference in Aspen. Ms. Keys, a longtime program director at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, arranged film series for the Aspen conference, and Mr. Glaser was the master designer.

As Ms. Keys recalls her first exposure to Mr. Glaser’s eloquence as a public speaker in her Director’s Statement: “I remember the first time I saw him give a lecture. It astonished me that a man whose work was so visual could also be so verbal. He had the audience completely entranced as he articulated his complex ideas with exquisite clarity and glorious imagery.”

When Ms. Keys finally approached Mr. Glaser to do a documentary about him, she worried as a first-time filmmaker that he would insist on a more experienced director for the task. Instead, he immediately accepted her offer, saying that he enjoyed the idea that they would both be learning as the work progressed.

What elevates the film to something more than a talking-heads documentary is the rapport established between Mr. Glaser and Ms. Keys on a project they both saw as a visual and verbal love letter to New York City, emblazoned in the Glaser-designed omnipresent I Love NY logo with a heart sign in place of the word “Love.” Throughout the film, Mr. Glaser is entertainingly irrepressible as he displays not only his full confidence in the proceedings, but also the impatience of an 80-year-old visual visionary who seems to have been waiting all his life for the opportunity to present this vision on film. His zest and glee in the process are truly infectious.

asarris@observer.com

Stephen Belber’s Management, from his own screenplay, is based on a one-act play he wrote as part of a projected series that took place in motel rooms. The series idea was abandoned, but the one-acter was eventually directed onstage by Mr. Belber’s wife, Lucie Tiberghien. Now, the play’s two central characters, Sue and Mike, have become the protagonists of his directorial feature film debut, with Jennifer Aniston cast as Sue, and Steve Zahn as Mike. Retained also were the notions of transience and mobility in American life experiences.

When Sue, on a business trip, checks into an Arizona roadside motel managed by Mike and owned by his parents, Trish (Margo Martindale) and Jerry (Fred Ward), the stage is set for Mike to make a play for Sue in the most painfully transparent manner by offering her free Champagne, ostensibly as part of a motel promotion. When Sue calmly asks Mike what he hopes to gain by his obvious pickup ploy, he answers frankly that at the very least he should be permitted to pat her butt as a possible prelude to you know what. Sue thoughtfully gives him permission to do just that and nothing more, and I frankly could not remember, in the long history of romantic couplings onscreen, a precedent for this opening maneuver, which Ms. Aniston and Mr. Zahn execute with breathtaking aplomb for five seconds that seem to extend to a mirthful eternity.

Up to this point, Mike has been living in a shell that threatened to encase him forever, while Sue has been consumed by her job as a saleswoman for a Baltimore company, with most of her emotional energy expended in charitable causes. As Mike later astutely observes, she has never spent any time exploring her own needs.

In any event, Sue and Mike consummate their still tentative relationship the next morning in the motel laundry room before she flies back to Baltimore. When Mike impulsively follows her across the country, he discovers to his dismay that she is involved with a yogurt tycoon, Jango (Woody Harrelson). Sue tells Mike that there is no future for them together when his life is so aimless and so lacking in serious purpose. The rest of the film is concerned with Mike’s often farcical attempts to find his way in order to satisfy Sue’s requirements.

All in all, Mr. Belber’s narrative is nothing if not far-fetched, but his lead players are directed well enough to endow their screwballish characters with emotional conviction in the midst of the chaos and uncertainty of their tangled relationship. In this Springtime of our Discontent, Management offers a bit of sunny but not entirely silly escapism. In the process, Ms. Aniston, Mr. Zahn and Mr. Harrelson, along with the rest of the cast, continue their productive careers with full-bodied distinction.

asarris@observer.com

Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours (L’Heure d’Été), from his own screenplay (in French with English subtitles), is curiously described by the 54-year-old writer-director of a dozen or more feature films as his “most Taiwanese film.” Mr. Assayas goes on to elaborate on his admiration for contemporary Chinese filmmakers: “It’s my own personal schizophrenia, but I’ve always felt like a sort of Taiwanese director working in France. When I started making movies, the preoccupations of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang affected me, resonated with my own. Later, I became interested in the work of Wong Kar-wai and Tsai Ming-liang. … With Summer Hours I return to very local material where there is a relationship to nature, time and modernity, the themes I share with Hou Hsiao-hsien.”

The film begins with the reunion of three far-flung 40-something siblings with their aging mother in her late uncle’s countryside mansion with its valuable 19th-century art collections. Adrienne (Juliette Binoche) has become a San Francisco and New York designer; one of her brothers, Frédéric (Charles Berling), has remained in Paris as a published economist and university professor; and the younger brother, Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), has become a successful businessman in China.

Hélène (Edith Scob), their mother, has decided that the time has come to discuss the division of her estate after her death. Hélène hoped against hope that her children would keep her home and its art treasures intact, but with two of her children established in faraway foreign lands, she sees little prospect of this happening. She’s pinned her dwindling prospects on Frédéric, at least to see that Lisa (Dominique Reymond), their longtime cook, maid and retainer, is generously rewarded for her long service to the family.

But Hélène’s death shortly after this first reunion, and a subsequent visit with Adrienne in San Francisco, compels Frédéric to undertake the difficult task of reconciling the wishes of the three children in disposing of their mother’s estate. Adrienne and Jérémie are too committed to their careers abroad even to contemplate returning to Paris except on short visits, and Frédéric has not been successful enough as an author to afford buying out their shares of the inheritance. A further complication arises when Adrienne insists on submitting a precious collection of their famous uncle’s sketches to Christie’s auction house in New York. The curator of the Musée d’Orsay, to which many of the artifacts in the house had been promised, threatens to block an exit permit for the sketches on the grounds that these are national treasures.

Behind all this agitation surrounding the disposition of part of France’s past, Mr. Assayas has acknowledged a metaphorical extension to trends in current economic policies of which he vehemently disapproves. “In Europe,” Mr. Assayas suggests, “there is a lot of abdication among technical sales executives who identify with Anglo-Saxon free-market culture and its values, learned interchangeably in French or American business schools. They scorn their own history, and deep down, their own identity. … I wanted to tell the story of a family that has roots in the past, but with ramifications in the present... Globalization is as much a human as economic phenomenonals.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Assayas has proposed a distinction between Adrienne, an artist whose talents freely cross international borders, and Jérémie, a business executive whose venue is determined by economic forces beyond his control. Frédéric, as the writer-director’s alter ego, does not condemn his two siblings. Yet there is a moment of pathos when Frédéric’s young daughter bursts into tears in her grandmother’s garden when she realizes that she will never be able to repeat to her own grandchildren the same words in the same place where her own grandmother had held her close and told her how precious she was.

At this moment, Mr. Assayas comes close to replicating a similar feeling of helpless nostalgia in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. As it is, the writer-director of some of the most sharp-edged critiques of modern mores in the French cinema has softened his approach, except as regards his dour view of museums as dark places that embalm art objects instead of enhancing them.

asarris@observer.com

Carlos Sorín’s The Window (La Ventana), from a screenplay (in Spanish with English subtitles) by Mr. Sorín, in collaboration with Pedro Maizal, turns out to be a far more realistic and austere film than the work Mr. Sorín asserts inspired him, Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries (1957). As Mr. Sorín explains in his Director’s Statement: “At the beginning of the 60s, when I was a young spectator who spent his afternoons and evenings in cinemas with continued screen shows … I must have seen Wild Strawberries 15 to 20 times. … Later on, it disappeared from my life and I remembered it as the great love of adolescence. However, last year when I had concluded the script of The Window, once again, unexpectedly, I felt the need to watch it. … The movie still conserved its original intensity, but the surprise was that the script I was writing was in many respects, and without me being aware of it, an involuntary remake of Bergman’s film.”

In one respect, and in one respect only, do I find The Window at all comparable to Wild Strawberries, and that is in the real-life gravity and majesty of the aged protagonists of both films. In The Window, it is Antonio Larreta as old Antonio. Mr. Larreta is a Uruguayan writer, playwright and actor who has worked in both Spain and Argentina, and in 1980 received the Premio Planeta award for his novel Volavérunt; Antonio’s counterpart in Wild Strawberries was Victor Sjöström (1879-1960), who, with his friend Mauritz Stiller (1883-1928), elevated the early Swedish silent cinema to worldwide preeminence.

Looking at Mr. Larreta in The Window and Sjöström in Wild Strawberries, one is struck by the inescapable pathos of the most richly fulfilled lives as these lives approach the finish line.

Unfortunately, Mr. Sorín’s protagonist is much closer to the end, and much more infirm than Mr. Bergman’s. Whereas the old man in The Window is almost completely bedridden and attached to an IV, the old man in Wild Strawberries still drives everywhere at the wheel of his own car. Also, the Sjöström character has a much more active dream life than Mr. Larreta’s character. And, of course, there is much more talk of God in Mr. Bergman’s world than in Mr. Sorín’s. Not that this is necessarily a plus for Mr. Bergman’s films, particularly among his severest detractors. By the evidence of The Window, Mr. Sorín is probably an agnostic, if not an outright atheist. And there is no comparison between Mr. Sorín’s marginalized female characters and Mr. Bergman’s obsessively drawn women led by such charter members of his illustrious stock company as Bibi Andersson and Ingrid Thulin.

Still, The Window is not without a certain visual spell that makes it a first-rate artistic achievement. So see it, but be sure to order a DVD of Wild Strawberries, if only to confirm why The Window has struck me as something of a disappointment despite its undeniably greater realism than Wild Strawberries. Perhaps it is because I have reached a point in my life when I can do with a little less realism about old age that I’m so hard on The Window.

asarris@observer.com

Atom Egoyan’s Adoration, from his own screenplay, is the 48-year-old, Cairo-born, Armenian-Canadian writer-director’s 12th feature film in a 32-year career that has spanned several media and art forms, and many countries, and for which he has received worldwide honors. I first became aware of his enormous talent with 1994’s Exotica, and have been following his work ever since, as well as retroactively in his past. What is particularly timely about Adoration, and perhaps ahead of its time, is its concern with the creation of new identities through technological advances in Internet communication.

Sabine (Arsinée Khanjian) is a high-school French teacher who provides her class with a translation exercise based on a real news story about a terrorist who plants a bomb in the carry-on luggage of his pregnant girlfriend. A student named Simon (Devon Bostick) is so profoundly stirred by the assignment that he re-imagines the news story as his own family history, with his late father standing in for the terrorist.

Simon had been made an orphan some years before when his father (Noam Jenkins) crashed the family car, killing both himself and his wife (Rachel Blanchard). Ever since, the orphaned Simon has lived with his uncle (Scott Speedman), and been fixated on his suspicion that the so-called accident was an intentional suicide-murder on his father’s part.

Mr. Egoyan has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew in fashioning a narrative in which a series of delusionary scenes are intertwined with disconnected realities in ever-shifting locations. As the program notes tell us, “One of the original inspirations for the film came from a 1986 news story Egoyan had read about a Jordanian man who sent his pregnant Irish girlfriend on an El Al flight with a bomb in her handbag, of which she had no knowledge until security found it.”

In tracing the genesis of his film from this news story, Mr. Egoyan explains: “The story always struck me because it was one of the first examples of how extreme a terrorist act could be and how one could turn someone close into an abstraction—not only a fiancée but also an unborn child. I came across the story again in 2006 and began to wonder about the child and the legacy of being raised knowing what your father had done.”

The big problem with the film is that Mr. Egoyan’s narrative is frequently suspended between real incidents and mere speculations to the point that the viewer may lose track of what has actually happened, and by, with and to whom. Also, what doesn’t happen is more sensational than what does. Hence, the trick ending—which I shall, of course, never reveal even under the threat of torture—fails to resolve the confusions of the narrative.

This is not to demean the sheer scope and ambitiousness of Mr. Egoyan’s enterprise, and its educated awareness of global politics, economics and technological advances in our daily lives. Mr. Egoyan himself is a man of many cultural identities. His sensitivity to the expressive potential of his performers is once again reaffirmed in the masterly portrayals of Ms. Khanjian, Ms. Blanchard, Mr. Bostick, Mr. Speedman and Mr. Jenkins among many other members of the international cast. As for Mr. Egoyan, he remains an auteur at the highest level of cinematic creation, and even one of his lesser films, like Adoration, deserves to be seen.

asarris@observer.com