Mortenson as Frued.

An antiseptic departure for shock jock David Cronenberg, A Dangerous Method is a psychological tug of war between the father of modern psychiatry, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortenson), and his disciple Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) over the mind and sex of an overwrought mental patient named Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a mad Russian with a craving for spanking. Whacking her on her naked bottom must have worked. She ended up, years later, analyzing patients of her own. Too bad she didn’t also analyze this movie. It would have saved so much wasted time.

A grim 1912 period piece set in a mental clinic in Vienna at the dawn of 20th century enlightenment, the movie flirts with the peculiar relationship between novice Jung and mentor Freud while they both flirt with the same patient, but aside from Ms. Knightley’s lurid whupping without her panties on, nothing ever happens. The “dangerous method” in the title refers to the experiment by both analysts to radically treat the same female patient by taking her to bed. Not very scientific, but very, very talky. The textbook talk is more layered than the plot. The two doctors discuss their opposing theories in such a drawn-out series of academic letters between Austria and Switzerland that by the time they’re finished, the patient has developed an abstract hypothesis of her own. By the time they get around to testing their primal interest in Sabina between the uncomfortable-looking starched cotton sheets, they (as well as esteemed screenwriter Christopher Hampton) might be unhinged to discover their audience is snoring. Mr. Hampton adapted the script from his own stage play The Talking Cure, and it shows. Veteran Polish cinematographer Peter Suschitzky, who shoots all of Mr. Cronenberg’s films, gives everything the refined sheen of polyurethaned mahogany.

Considering herself vile, filthy and corrupt because she lusts for humiliation, Sabina listens to the inner voices of angels, then shrieks, shakes and stutters her way into a nervous fit while she squishes her food between her fingers in what I assume Ms. Knightley considers great acting. At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, everyone was twittering furiously about her titillating spanking scenes, but they hardly made up for the huge lapses of tedium between smacks. As Freud, who believes the basis of all insanity is sexual repression, and Jung, who is monogamous and resistant to such extremist views, the miscast male stars are bland as dust and look like a box of Smith Brothers cough drops.

In his two previous collaborations with Mr. Cronenberg, Mr. Mortenson’s full-frontal wrestling scene in Eastern Promises and twisted gang killer-turned-suburbanite in A History of Violence offered more challenges than anything in the buttoned-up role of Freud, and after Mr. Fassbender’s brutally punishing role as IRA hunger-strike-martyr Bobby Sands in Hunger and his rollicking nudity as a sex addict in Shame, I can’t imagine what attracted these two megahunks to such a bore.

rreed@observer.com

A DANGEROUS METHOD

Running Time 93 minutes

WRITTEN BY Christopher Hampton

DIRECTED BY David Cronenberg

STARRING Michael Fassbender, Keira Knightley and Viggo Mortensen

2/4

The exhibition's first room reconstructs Sigmund Freud's rug-strewn examining couch; it stands in for the unconscious at the unseen center of the show. Publications in vitrines examine the "woman problem" and the "sex and character" question. Portraits by Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka depict dreamers thin in their suits, and fat poets (Peter Altenberg); Adolf Loos' brass and wood Chairs for Café Campus and Josef Hoffman's elongated Chairs for the Dining Room of the Parkersdorf Sanatorium give these unstable-looking characters two possible destinations for respite. This is a culture obsessed with sex, coffee and madness, in no particular order.

The Viennese were also passionate about their furniture--a man could live or die by the chair he had in front of his office. "Every chair should be practical" and "perfect furniture produces perfect rooms" were two tenets of the designer and architect Loos. In one room, Otto Wagner's cushy Chair in Front of the Director's Office at the Austrian Postal Savings Bank, in upholstered black-stained oak, and zippy Armchair for Newspaper Dispatcher Bureau Die Zeit, in speedy metal, reveal that form doesn't just follow function, it lovingly stalks it, with obsessively bespoke results.

The Neue Galerie--a Museum Mile townhouse--feels more like a home than a white cube. Few institutions are prepared to take $30 million and $40 million paintings (the museum's Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustave Klimt is famously the most expensive painting ever purchased, at more than $130 million) and use them as props in period rooms replete with furniture and carpets. This curatorial premise derives from an adherence to the Gesamtkunstwerk, or "total work of art," style of this period. Perhaps no other museum is willing to take such expensive material and have so much fun with it.

A room stages decorative Secessionist style (block print wallpaper, an hourglass-patterned rug, bold black and white checked Koloman Moser chairs). Colorful Klimts hang here including the exotic 1916 Dancer. The other side of the same room showcases Loos, the original Strunk and White of design and dress simplicity who wrote Ornament and Crime, that vicious bible of good style. His are handsome brass and oak chairs, monochrome and functional gentleman's club furniture in solid rich materials.

In yet another room, paintings of the countryside show the Viennese vision of retreats on the lakes around Austria. In Klimt's Forest Slope in Unterach on the Attersee and Schiele's Town Among the Greenery, the forest slope and little town are so fashionably mannered with Japonisme and blue cloisonné lines that they are as natural as an upstate Arcadia shot by Terry Richardson.

In the main gallery, next to a constraining whalebone Corset, the flowing Reform Dress represents a breakthrough. In an early Klimt portrait, Serena Pulitzer Lederer, the title subject wears this new uncorseted style, and her figure is dematerialized into a sweeping white column. All the "Vienna 1900" women have this ethereal new shape. The corset becomes a metaphor for academic art like Hans Makart's 1875 Portrait of Hanna Klinkosch, laced-up next to the Secession's supple Modernism.

The Saturn Films company produced erotic films for the Viennese "gentleman's evening." Youth Games, Forbidden Bathing, An Exciting Hunt and A Modern Marriage are among the black-and-white shorts on rotation; the crowd around them suggested that they were as mesmerizing today as they had been popular in their time. Diana in the Bath marries the Austrian passions for hunting and voyeurism into one inspired clip of a huntress stripping and dipping in a forest pond. The content of Klimt's Reclining Female Semi-nude Facing Right and of other graphic odes to women gently masturbating belies their clinical titles.

Saturn's films were banned by 1909, and in 1912 authorities charged Schiele with kidnapping and corrupting a minor, jailed him and burned his drawings. Private fantasy and public morality were at odds. With the Emperor Franz Josef already 70 years old, the official policies were not as radical as the city's art and design culture. If, as Arnold Schoenberg said, "Art belongs to the unconscious mind," then the empire was its policing superego.

Vienna in 1900 was a place where you were defined by what you wore and what chair you bought, where everyone went to the country to pretend to get away yet saw their urban neighbors there. Its apartments were crowded with stuff; it was a place where women were seen as being more autonomous and dangerous than ever before. It was the myopic and stylish center of its own empire. So it's easy for a New Yorker to feel at home in the Neue Galerie this spring.

editorial@observer.com

He cajoled and exhorted, charmed and coaxed and used his amazing energy and unending enthusiasm to bring beauty and serenity to a city sacred to three of the world’s major religions. He metaphorically wrapped his arms around Jerusalem and protected it until the larger forces of extremism, both Arab and Orthodox Jew, started pulling it to pieces.

Teddy was a warm bear of a man with smiling eyes that I once saw fill with instant fury when I dared to suggest that “internationalization” was considered a possible solution to the problems of his city. For Jerusalem was his city. “To the Jews here, I’m a bastard,” he used to say. “To the Arabs, I’m a Zionist bastard.”

Teddy Kollek was in office for almost three decades, while six different Israeli prime ministers came and went. In 1965, the city was still barely more than a village when Teddy began to preside over its reunification and set out to restore its archeological treasures, to modernize its infrastructure and to bring a flourishing cultural life to the ancient metropolis.

He prowled the city on foot or drove himself around in a minuscule car that barely contained his bulk. In the summer of 1967, just after the war, he took me with him, a hair-raising experience—if he weren’t the mayor, he surely would’ve had his license lifted. Teddy would stop suddenly if something caught his eye. No one hesitated to walk right up to him to report a pothole or a dog fouling the walkway; he would pull his pen and notebook out of his breast pocket and write down the complaint. But in the long run, Teddy felt that his most important achievements were in making Jerusalem green, and in enforcing a rule that all the city’s buildings be faced in Jerusalem stone—the local limestone that gives the city its golden glow.

He created parks and squares and stopping places for tour buses and cars from which the people of Jerusalem could take in the sweep of the city. “Over there, you can see the Dead Sea, the desert, the hills of Moab, the old villages locked in time, the modern city, the Mount of Olives, Mount Scopus, Mount Zion, the Old City—you see there the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the Dome of the Rock, Herod’s Tomb.” He was taking stock of his city from the Walter and Ellen Haas promenade during another of my visits. “The special flag here is a pair of jeans,” he quipped, explaining that the donors were from the Levi family. The Levi family was just one of the many wealthy friends he called upon to support the Jerusalem Foundation, which he established during his first year as mayor, to undertake projects in his city. In addition to restoring Jerusalem’s ancient gates, the Western Wall, the Citadel and the stone path leading to the Stations of the Cross, he attended to the small details as well, like burying television antennas so they wouldn’t mar the historic landscape.

Each year, Teddy celebrated Christmas three times, once with his Roman Catholic constituents, once with his Greek Orthodox constituents, and once with the Armenian Orthodox. On any given day throughout the year, he would attend four breakfast meetings, three luncheons and several dinners—a schedule that played havoc with his waistline and left him little time for sleep. He became known for his catnaps. When an assistant once twitted him for sleeping at a public function, he replied, “You know, I wasn’t even tired, but I knew that was what was expected of me.”

During the Nazi occupation of Europe, he personally rescued Jews and raised funds to finance their escape. He was again the master fund-raiser when the fledging Israeli state needed planes and assorted weapons of war. As mayor, he worked impatiently to find ways to match a potential donor’s interest to a project. Of all those projects, the Israel Museum was his most personal: His goal, to create a world-class collection. To some in the struggling state, a museum seemed a luxury; to Teddy, it was an absolute necessity. He used his legendary powers of persuasion to extract contributions from around the world. It was a bitter personal disappointment, for example, when Mollie Parnis, the New York dress designer, allowed a treasured Matisse that he had his eye on to go to auction instead of to Israel, where he felt it belonged.

Mordechai Gur, the paratroop commander who led Israeli troops in the capture of the Old City in 1967, said of Teddy: “He was born for that job.” But as Teddy himself was fond of saying, he was also brought up for it. When he first immigrated to Israel, he lived on a kibbutz with Arab neighbors. Of growing up in Vienna, where his father was a director of the Rothschild bank, he recalled: “I lived in a Catholic city. There was a Catholic monastery next-door. I was not afraid of a church, as others might be who had come from a shtetl …. My father took me to museums every weekend. I went to opera, theater; I lived in a city that in 1919 had the first elections, and the election posters were in German, of course, and also Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Croat. It was a cosmopolitan city. I came from a multiracial society.”

But he knew that he could not re-create Vienna in Jerusalem, not with Orthodox Jews trying to impose their own laws on the entire city, and not with Arabs who refused to vote because the mayor was doing far more for the Jewish residents than he was for them. For a while it almost seemed possible that, under Teddy, the cultural mosaic would become a way of life—until October 1990, when the fragile truce was broken on the Temple Mount, an area sacred to Muslims and Jews. Nineteen Palestinians were killed by Israeli policemen in a clash that Mayor Kollek called “the most unfortunate thing that happened in the 22 years since the city was united.” That tragic incident, which Teddy felt as a personal affront, along with the intifada, all but ended the hope that this magical city could one day become (as a popular Israeli song would have it) “Jerusalem the Golden.”

Teddy Kollek was defeated for a seventh term as mayor. By 1993, the growing militancy of the Arabs and the rising population of ultra-religious Jews made Jerusalem a far less hospitable place for a liberal like Teddy. He lost to the Likud candidate, Ehud Olmert, now the Israeli prime minister, who eulogized him at his burial in a place of honor reserved for the giants of the Israeli state, on Mount Herzl overlooking the beloved city to which he had dedicated his heart and soul. “Jerusalem without Teddy,” Saul Bellow wrote, “is as inconceivable as Israel itself without Jerusalem.”

The appeal of the painting is slight in comparison to Frick staples—Bellini, say, or Vermeer and Corot—but that’s not to say its charms aren’t real. Once it catches the eye, Liotard’s handiwork is hard to resist. The skill that went into mimicking the grain of the wood and delineating cast shadows is considerable. The crowd-pleasing technique is no less impressive in an era accustomed to computer-generated imagery. The pleasure we experience through illusions conjured directly by the human hand—the “gee whiz” factor, let’s call it—is too primal a phenomenon to discount.

Trompe l’Oeil is included in Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789): Swiss Master, an exhibition of some 50 works on display in the Frick’s basement galleries. If you haven’t heard of Liotard, don’t sweat it. Though internationally renowned during his lifetime, Liotard’s contemporary reputation doesn’t extend much beyond his native Switzerland. He’s a local hero.

Few of the paintings, drawings, miniatures and engravings on view have been exhibited before in the United States. Most are on loan from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva and private collections in Switzerland. The Frick is the sole American venue for the Swiss master, and if his countrymen are hoping to make Liotard a household name stateside, they have their work cut out for them.

The reason for Liotard’s limited appeal is understandable: He was a bit of a nut. He began his career as a miniaturist, studying in Geneva, his birthplace, and later in Paris. An attempt to join the French Royal Academy in 1735 was met with rejection, prompting the young artist to pack his bags and head for more accommodating milieus.

After a stopover in Italy, Liotard settled for four years in Constantinople. He grew a long beard and dressed himself in the garb of a native, adopting the persona of “the Turkish painter.” Presenting himself as such upon his return to Europe, Liotard’s newfound guise all but guaranteed notoriety, particularly at a time when facial hair was decidedly not the rage in fashionable circles.

A degree of indignation followed upon the arrival of “Le Peintre Turc” in Vienna and Paris, but so did financial success (surprise, surprise). While in Vienna, Liotard caught the eye of Empress Maria Theresa. She would become his lifelong patron. Then, as now, shtick sells.

To contemporary eyes, Liotard’s appropriation of a foreign culture will seem fairly ridiculous, if not outright racist. Liotard with a Beard (1749), wherein the incredibly un-Turkish Liotard is seen dabbing daintily at a canvas, is notable more for its painstaking dexterity than any sense of ethnocentric homage—or indiscretion. More intriguing are the self-portraits without blatant artifice. Liotard shaved his beard only once, as a wedding present to his wife. What a man will do for a woman, a woman will do for art—albeit inadvertently.

The clean-shaven Liotard is seen in Liotard Laughing (circa 1770). It’s the showstopper, if only because it’s such a weird painting. Most self-portraits capture an artist soberly deliberating upon his individuality; concentration and gravity, not levity, are the standard. In Liotard Laughing, the painter looks directly at the viewer. With a gap-toothed smile, he points with a crooked finger at something unseen to the right. The intended whimsicality and spontaneity ring false. Liotard’s technical scrupulousness is akin to taxidermy—it stills life rather than inhabits it. Liotard Laughing will give you the creeps, and that’s the sole reason you’ll remember it.

A self-portrait done in black and white chalk has a fulsome tonal range that recalls the penetrating chiaroscuro of Rembrandt. But the drawing is the exception to Liotard’s rule. He had no truck with painterly trappings or, for that matter, the deeper reaches of human experience.

In Treatise on the Principles and Rules of Painting, published in 1781, Liotard advised against visible traces of the artist’s hand. Since one didn’t see brushstrokes in nature, he reasoned, they had no place in art: Mimesis didn’t allow for material sensuality. Liotard could fool the eye, but he could not yield control. As a result, the “painter of truth” became a victim of his own expertise.

Looking at an early drawing of his twin brother, with its ill-proportioned head and unconvincingly rendered vestments, one can see why the Royal Academy turned Liotard down. Still, the artist tenaciously honed his finicky gift, ultimately wringing from it an impressive, if not altogether fluid, proficiency.

It’s in the portraits of Empress Maria Theresa’s children, done in pencil, chalk, pastel and watercolor, that Liotard managed to move beyond his own stultifying preconceptions about art, not to mention the well-rehearsed demeanor of his subjects. Gentleness emerges from the cautious gaze of Maria Christine, a sense of noble purpose from Maximilian Franz and a saucy skepticism from Marie Antoinette—yes, that Marie Antoinette. In drawings like these, Liotard elicits, if just barely, a sense of vulnerability and understanding. They’re a welcome respite from an otherwise quizzical and narrow achievement.

Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789): Swiss Master is at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, until Sept. 17.

The appeal of the painting is slight in comparison to Frick staples—Bellini, say, or Vermeer and Corot—but that’s not to say its charms aren’t real. Once it catches the eye, Liotard’s handiwork is hard to resist. The skill that went into mimicking the grain of the wood and delineating cast shadows is considerable. The crowd-pleasing technique is no less impressive in an era accustomed to computer-generated imagery. The pleasure we experience through illusions conjured directly by the human hand—the “gee whiz” factor, let’s call it—is too primal a phenomenon to discount.

Trompe l’Oeil is included in Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789): Swiss Master, an exhibition of some 50 works on display in the Frick’s basement galleries. If you haven’t heard of Liotard, don’t sweat it. Though internationally renowned during his lifetime, Liotard’s contemporary reputation doesn’t extend much beyond his native Switzerland. He’s a local hero.

Few of the paintings, drawings, miniatures and engravings on view have been exhibited before in the United States. Most are on loan from the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva and private collections in Switzerland. The Frick is the sole American venue for the Swiss master, and if his countrymen are hoping to make Liotard a household name stateside, they have their work cut out for them.

The reason for Liotard’s limited appeal is understandable: He was a bit of a nut. He began his career as a miniaturist, studying in Geneva, his birthplace, and later in Paris. An attempt to join the French Royal Academy in 1735 was met with rejection, prompting the young artist to pack his bags and head for more accommodating milieus.

After a stopover in Italy, Liotard settled for four years in Constantinople. He grew a long beard and dressed himself in the garb of a native, adopting the persona of “the Turkish painter.” Presenting himself as such upon his return to Europe, Liotard’s newfound guise all but guaranteed notoriety, particularly at a time when facial hair was decidedly not the rage in fashionable circles.

A degree of indignation followed upon the arrival of “Le Peintre Turc” in Vienna and Paris, but so did financial success ( surprise, surprise). While in Vienna, Liotard caught the eye of Empress Maria Theresa. She would become his lifelong patron. Then, as now, shtick sells.

To contemporary eyes, Liotard’s appropriation of a foreign culture will seem fairly ridiculous, if not outright racist. Liotard with a Beard (1749), wherein the incredibly un-Turkish Liotard is seen dabbing daintily at a canvas, is notable more for its painstaking dexterity than any sense of ethnocentric homage—or indiscretion. More intriguing are the self-portraits without blatant artifice. Liotard shaved his beard only once, as a wedding present to his wife. What a man will do for a woman, a woman will do for art—albeit inadvertently.

The clean-shaven Liotard is seen in Liotard Laughing (circa 1770). It’s the showstopper, if only because it’s such a weird painting. Most self-portraits capture an artist soberly deliberating upon his individuality; concentration and gravity, not levity, are the standard. In Liotard Laughing, the painter looks directly at the viewer. With a gap-toothed smile, he points with a crooked finger at something unseen to the right. The intended whimsicality and spontaneity ring false. Liotard’s technical scrupulousness is akin to taxidermy—it stills life rather than inhabits it. Liotard Laughing will give you the creeps, and that’s the sole reason you’ll remember it.

A self-portrait done in black and white chalk has a fulsome tonal range that recalls the penetrating chiaroscuro of Rembrandt. But the drawing is the exception to Liotard’s rule. He had no truck with painterly trappings or, for that matter, the deeper reaches of human experience.

In Treatise on the Principles and Rules of Painting, published in 1781, Liotard advised against visible traces of the artist’s hand. Since one didn’t see brushstrokes in nature, he reasoned, they had no place in art: Mimesis didn’t allow for material sensuality. Liotard could fool the eye, but he could not yield control. As a result, the “painter of truth” became a victim of his own expertise.

Looking at an early drawing of his twin brother, with its ill-proportioned head and unconvincingly rendered vestments, one can see why the Royal Academy turned Liotard down. Still, the artist tenaciously honed his finicky gift, ultimately wringing from it an impressive, if not altogether fluid, proficiency.

It’s in the portraits of Empress Maria Theresa’s children, done in pencil, chalk, pastel and watercolor, that Liotard managed to move beyond his own stultifying preconceptions about art, not to mention the well-rehearsed demeanor of his subjects. Gentleness emerges from the cautious gaze of Maria Christine, a sense of noble purpose from Maximilian Franz and a saucy skepticism from Marie Antoinette—yes, that Marie Antoinette. In drawings like these, Liotard elicits, if just barely, a sense of vulnerability and understanding. They’re a welcome respite from an otherwise quizzical and narrow achievement.

Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789): Swiss Master is at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, until Sept. 17.

You have to get the rhythm of Venice, says the Count, and “the rhythm in Venice is like breathing.” What he means by that is the rise and fall of tides and water pressure. He expands his own theory. He takes in the light (it served Tintoretto and Whistler), its painted quality. After all, is this a city, a plausible city, built on piles as the water rises, or is it just the scarred backdrop in a play about peril, a city that can hardly be mapped, where the stranger must either gain assurance or let himself get lost? (Sometimes it’s a matter of following your nose or some odd, childlike figure in red.) The Count is as arresting as the brass at the start of a Mahler symphony. He’s just three pages, with a knockout exit line. Having shared his theory, he announces: “Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

Aha! You may be realizing we’ve been here before, with John Berendt’s last book—his only other book—Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A decade later (after he’s read at nearly every bookstore in America), he’s chosen Venice as his new Savannah. It’s another port city, with odd characters and a twisted history. We’ll get a crime and a trial, and we’ll be left not quite sure whether we’ve been reading a new form of thriller or a ravishing travel book. Isn’t the strongest pull left after the last page simply the desire to get yourself to Savannah, or Venice, and to be part of the smoke-and-mirrors routine?

Well, be warned: Mr. Berendt is a tricky narrator, a spellbinder but not entirely straightforward. If you remember, the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—no matter that its director, Clint Eastwood, prides himself on unfussy storytelling—made the most dreadful hash of an intricate book; it was a coarse-grained sieve that couldn’t hold the all-important atmosphere. The City of Falling Angels, I suspect, is a better book, so yes, you may need to alter the way you breathe—and at the same time keep track of the risks of doing so, which seem as obvious as air.

It’s not quite clear whether John Berendt has come to Venice as an author on holiday, a success wandering for fresh material, or as a dangerous man himself, invisible, or anyway indistinct, who’s stirring it all up. There are times when he finds fascinating people who’ll talk to us for a few pages, though we still want the camera to turn to show us Mr. Berendt’s listening face. Is it that of an honest traveler? Or is he a director willing his people to speak their speeches beautifully, yet cryptically enough so that we seldom relax in that summery thing called trust? (And truly, Venice in summer is too much audience.)

Yes, there’s an incident that will lead to a trial—the burning of the Fenice Opera House on the evening of Monday, Jan. 29, 1996, a treasure amid all the other treasures of Venice, a place where five Verdi operas had their premieres. Was the fire the result of negligence or arson? As we begin to realize, flames are all very well—they stay in the memory, they inspire stories and works of art—but accident v. impulse takes you to the very heart of the perplexity of being in Venice. Does human motive rise and fall, just like the tides? Or is it constant, and playful? Or worse?

Not that The City of Falling Angels intends to be anything like as tightly organized as that “thriller” from Savannah. That was a book about a small knot of people, and we knew that even if all of them were lying, some had a darker design. The new book seems at first far more like an anthology of Venetian views and characters, a kind of “People I met while I was thinking about the Fenice fire.” It’s as if The Third Man took time off from wondering about Harry Lime to ask itself where the city of Vienna was keeping its Schiele paintings, how the Prater came to be, and why people of a certain age are inclined to blame “the whole thing” on Vienna. What whole thing? Don’t ask—if you have to ask, start again.

So Mr. Berendt meets glassblowers who’ve blown glass on Murano for generations—and who’ve quarreled just as long. He surveys dark piano nobiles and wonders if they’re rotting, or just waiting for the next ghostly rental. He touches on the uncomfortable story of what happened to the Ezra Pound papers, and Olga Rudge and Jane and Philip Rylands, custodians of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. (Yes, I know they’re real people, real enough to sue—but are they sound?) We learn about an inexplicable suicide. We discover a fierce but very shy lawyer. We meet a man whose special trade is to rid the world of rats, who makes a rat poison for every national culinary taste. We see two dark figures bundle up several hundred of the city’s damnable pigeons in a net. We learn how American money and self-importance meant that the Save Venice foundation split. (That’s a very Venetian story, with two institutions at war in the cause of salvation.)

And all the while, we’re passing the great sites—the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria Della Salute, the Volpi Palace, slipping back and forth, like the vaporetti or like the tides, with the gondolas like sleek coffins. There will be some readers, I fear, who complain that there’s not enough suspenseful organization, that there are too many diverse strands, that it doesn’t quite add up.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from making a winter reservation for Venice. This is not so much a companion for travelers as a book to carry you away. Venice is not large. You could walk it in a day, getting lost and making the most fabulous discoveries, while hearing Verdi and Vivaldi in the slap of the water, and feeling that Milly Theale, Colonel Cantwell or the sickly gaze of Herr von Aschenbach were following you, as you did your best to keep up with that elusive figure in red. I know, I shouldn’t go farther—there are gloomy, wet narrows in Venice that are the black blood of noir. But this is a haunting book, and if you’ve ever had notions of being an angel, or falling, you’ll love it.

By the way, the title comes from a warning posted on the Salute church in the early 70’s, when the occasional plunge of a carved angel promised deliverance to a passer-by.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

You have to get the rhythm of Venice, says the Count, and “the rhythm in Venice is like breathing.” What he means by that is the rise and fall of tides and water pressure. He expands his own theory. He takes in the light (it served Tintoretto and Whistler), its painted quality. After all, is this a city, a plausible city, built on piles as the water rises, or is it just the scarred backdrop in a play about peril, a city that can hardly be mapped, where the stranger must either gain assurance or let himself get lost? (Sometimes it’s a matter of following your nose or some odd, childlike figure in red.) The Count is as arresting as the brass at the start of a Mahler symphony. He’s just three pages, with a knockout exit line. Having shared his theory, he announces: “Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say.”

Aha! You may be realizing we’ve been here before, with John Berendt’s last book—his only other book— Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. A decade later (after he’s read at nearly every bookstore in America), he’s chosen Venice as his new Savannah. It’s another port city, with odd characters and a twisted history. We’ll get a crime and a trial, and we’ll be left not quite sure whether we’ve been reading a new form of thriller or a ravishing travel book. Isn’t the strongest pull left after the last page simply the desire to get yourself to Savannah, or Venice, and to be part of the smoke-and-mirrors routine?

Well, be warned: Mr. Berendt is a tricky narrator, a spellbinder but not entirely straightforward. If you remember, the movie of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil—no matter that its director, Clint Eastwood, prides himself on unfussy storytelling—made the most dreadful hash of an intricate book; it was a coarse-grained sieve that couldn’t hold the all-important atmosphere. The City of Falling Angels, I suspect, is a better book, so yes, you may need to alter the way you breathe—and at the same time keep track of the risks of doing so, which seem as obvious as air.

It’s not quite clear whether John Berendt has come to Venice as an author on holiday, a success wandering for fresh material, or as a dangerous man himself, invisible, or anyway indistinct, who’s stirring it all up. There are times when he finds fascinating people who’ll talk to us for a few pages, though we still want the camera to turn to show us Mr. Berendt’s listening face. Is it that of an honest traveler? Or is he a director willing his people to speak their speeches beautifully, yet cryptically enough so that we seldom relax in that summery thing called trust? (And truly, Venice in summer is too much audience.)

Yes, there’s an incident that will lead to a trial—the burning of the Fenice Opera House on the evening of Monday, Jan. 29, 1996, a treasure amid all the other treasures of Venice, a place where five Verdi operas had their premieres. Was the fire the result of negligence or arson? As we begin to realize, flames are all very well—they stay in the memory, they inspire stories and works of art—but accident v. impulse takes you to the very heart of the perplexity of being in Venice. Does human motive rise and fall, just like the tides? Or is it constant, and playful? Or worse?

Not that The City of Falling Angels intends to be anything like as tightly organized as that “thriller” from Savannah. That was a book about a small knot of people, and we knew that even if all of them were lying, some had a darker design. The new book seems at first far more like an anthology of Venetian views and characters, a kind of “People I met while I was thinking about the Fenice fire.” It’s as if The Third Man took time off from wondering about Harry Lime to ask itself where the city of Vienna was keeping its Schiele paintings, how the Prater came to be, and why people of a certain age are inclined to blame “the whole thing” on Vienna. What whole thing? Don’t ask—if you have to ask, start again.

So Mr. Berendt meets glassblowers who’ve blown glass on Murano for generations—and who’ve quarreled just as long. He surveys dark piano nobiles and wonders if they’re rotting, or just waiting for the next ghostly rental. He touches on the uncomfortable story of what happened to the Ezra Pound papers, and Olga Rudge and Jane and Philip Rylands, custodians of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. (Yes, I know they’re real people, real enough to sue—but are they sound?) We learn about an inexplicable suicide. We discover a fierce but very shy lawyer. We meet a man whose special trade is to rid the world of rats, who makes a rat poison for every national culinary taste. We see two dark figures bundle up several hundred of the city’s damnable pigeons in a net. We learn how American money and self-importance meant that the Save Venice foundation split. (That’s a very Venetian story, with two institutions at war in the cause of salvation.)

And all the while, we’re passing the great sites—the Rialto Bridge, Santa Maria Della Salute, the Volpi Palace, slipping back and forth, like the vaporetti or like the tides, with the gondolas like sleek coffins. There will be some readers, I fear, who complain that there’s not enough suspenseful organization, that there are too many diverse strands, that it doesn’t quite add up.

It was all I could do to restrain myself from making a winter reservation for Venice. This is not so much a companion for travelers as a book to carry you away. Venice is not large. You could walk it in a day, getting lost and making the most fabulous discoveries, while hearing Verdi and Vivaldi in the slap of the water, and feeling that Milly Theale, Colonel Cantwell or the sickly gaze of Herr von Aschenbach were following you, as you did your best to keep up with that elusive figure in red. I know, I shouldn’t go farther—there are gloomy, wet narrows in Venice that are the black blood of noir. But this is a haunting book, and if you’ve ever had notions of being an angel, or falling, you’ll love it.

By the way, the title comes from a warning posted on the Salute church in the early 70’s, when the occasional plunge of a carved angel promised deliverance to a passer-by.

David Thomson, author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf), reviews books regularly for The Observer.

It was late Friday night outside Bungalow 8, the super-exclusive nightclub where New York's most glamorous and beautiful young people enjoy conversation, flirting and something stronger than soda pop. Located on a bleak stretch of West 27th Street between 10th and 11th avenues, the club can hold at most about 150 people and turns away the great majority of the people who wish to enter.

Armin, the dashing 33-year-old Iranian doorman, was wearing a fur hat and a blue cashmere coat over a $1,800 suit. He was standing behind the velvet rope he's manned since the club opened in 2001. He let in an elegant, rich looking fellow, got on his walkie-talkie, then turned his attention to a former regular who had been 86'd by Bungalow 8's owner, the tall, glamorous and sophisticated Amy Sacco, for his habit of rolling in with eight people, promising to spend a lot of money, then ordering Corona beers.

"Listen, Pete," Armin said, "we're starting a new phase. Don't go in there acting like you're going to buy Cristal and you're gonna be the man. Just go in there and have your beer and chill."

"All right," Pete peeped.

Armin parted the rope but still blocked the steel door with the "8" on it.

"If Amy sees you, she might crack a bottle on your head," he added.

A black S.U.V. pulled up and one of the mangy Olsen twins hopped out and didn't slow down as she scurried past the rope. "How are you? Come on in," Armin said.

At 3:15 a.m., a fight broke out across the street: A falafel guy got sucker-punched, then beaten up by no-neck steroid goons. The victim, wiping away blood, called the police. Armin shook his head and turned his attention back to a drunk guy at the rope who wouldn't give it up.

"Have a good night-you need a reservation, bro," Armin told him. "I have nothing to talk to you about."

"But my friends are in there already!"

"I don't care if your momma's in there, don't touch me."

"I'm not touching you!"

"Don't get too close to me. I hear you from right here. I hear you, so have a good night."

"You're a fucking prick, you're a fucking prick!"

"Thank you! Fuck you, too!" Armin said, laughing.

Although it's stressful to be out there for five hours making and breaking peoples' nights, he's not complaining. The money's good, he gets free designer clothes. Plus: "You really see people's true faces."

"I think it's funner outside the club, because you get to see a lot of different characters," said Armin, who's an aspiring actor. "This is a great acting school. I actually turn into a different character."

More desperate people lined up to plead their case.

"Can you take care of me? I'm just by myself."

"I can't take care of anybody right now," Armin said. "You gotta make a reservation."

(What he doesn't tell people is, not just anyone can make a reservation; it helps to know Ms. Sacco.)

One recent evening, he parted the rope for the Bush twins (Barbara and Jenna), Chelsea Clinton and John Kerry's stepson, Chris Heinz. "They were two tables apart," he said. "We're living in a harmony in America-here is the refugee boy handling these people!"

("I find Bush very funny," Armin said later. "I laugh when I see him on TV, he's got this sort of confidence. I even told his daughter, 'I think your dad has this amazing confidence. He looks like he doesn't really care what people think,' and she says, 'He doesn't.'" But he added: "My boy is Clinton. I love that man. He came to Bungalow twice.")

More hopeful, pleading looks Armin's way.

"Sorry, Amy has shut the door down, we're done for the night."

"This place has given me a power more than I could ever imagine in my life," he admitted. "I've had Congressmen's offices giving me a call trying to get people in. Then you have President Bush's daughters coming in: sweethearts. I don't care what people say about Bush, here comes his daughters and I'm this refugee boy. I wasn't letting them in the first couple of times, until I got a call from Fabian Basabe saying 'There's two girls in the front, Barbara and Jenna, could you take care of them?' This was me telling no to the daughters! I kept them waiting. I have kept the son of the Shah of Iran for an hour-his dad would have cut my head back in the day. That's the beauty of America, do you know?

"I'm really good at what I do," he continued. "That's scary. I have no explanation, I have quite strong instincts about people, and I sense right away whether you're right to come in or not. And it has nothing to do with what you wear and what shoes you have or who you are.

"Women are the worst in this scenario, women really are," he said. "Because women in a lot of ways feel entitled. My worst comment is, 'Are you going to take care of two beautiful women or what?'"

He lets people hang themselves first: "I never say anything. You come to the rope and I let you talk first, and most people fail that test right away. Most rejected women call me 'faggot' right away, because I'm not giving them the attention. 'What-do you like cock?' they say. It happens every night.

"Saying no to people is never fun, because I'm a generous person, I like to give," he said. "It's not personal. We have five categories of how you can get into Bungalow: You have a reservation? Are you a member? Are you on the house list? Do you want to get a bottle, a table? How many guys are you with? And if you come to the rope and act up, or with bad energy, you can forget it."

Armin, who didn't want to give his last name for fear it might have repercussions for his parents back in Iran, grew up a privileged only child in Tehran. He said his Persian mother was a film star; his father was "new Iran" and became a successful makeup artist and hairdresser. Armin was there for the revolution in 1979 (his maternal grandfather was a general in the Shah's army) and the early part of the war with Iraq. He was two blocks away when a bomb killed 45 kids.

"I was ready to get out," he said. "As a little kid, I couldn't understand Islam whatsoever. Islam is not for today. Fifteen hundred years ago? Great."

By 1982, his parents had lost everything. His father was in jail because of his ties to the Shah, and his mother arranged for a Kurdish con man to take Armin through the mountains into Turkey. The donkey ride lasted 13 days through the snow.

His mother showed up in Istanbul and stayed with him for six months, but then had to leave. He wouldn't see her for 18 years.

He said he entered Bulgaria with a fake passport, but the authorities caught up with him. He had 7,000 marks on him, 4,000 of which had been sewn into his underwear. A bus driver said for 7,000 marks he'd take him to Austria, so he hopped on. At around 3 a.m., the guy next to him showed him the porno mag he was checking out, then whipped out his penis.

Armin slammed the man's head into seat in front of him, ran to tell the bus driver, who didn't believe his story and ordered him out. Now Armin was in the middle of Yugoslavia with no money. A Hungarian family helped him out with a ride, and he soon found another con man who took him to a refugee camp outside Vienna.

First he was held for eight weeks in quarantine. The bathrooms were so disgusting that he held it in until he broke out in a fever, then was taken to a hospital, where he stayed for a week. Armin did a lot of jump rope and pushups, wrote letters to his mom and cried a lot. "This was the lowest point," he said. "I wanted to come to America." Days, he bummed around Vienna, stealing food. He was 13.

"When you're a refugee and you don't have any money, you will do anything to survive," he said. "There are things I've done that I'm ashamed of, but it was just a part of my life."

He started dipping into Vienna nightlife. He found work at a nightclub and hooked up with older women who helped him move out of the refugee camp, providing him with money, clothes and weekends in Salzburg. "They made me feel great and they were really kind to me, so God bless 'em," he said.

He started bartending at a gay bar called Why Not? ("I saw things there I've never seen in my life.") At 17, he dated a rich American girl who married him and brought him home to Grosse Pointe, Mich. Her father, unaware of the betrothal, got him a $12-an-hour job at Ford Motors, but said if he had any intention of ever marrying his daughter to forget it. He decided to leave.

A friend from the refugee camp, who was now living in San Francisco, offered him a crash pad. He quickly met a Russian-American girl who invited him to stay with her in Sausalito. "Next thing you know, I'm living with this girl and her mother, and they have this swimming pool overlooking the whole city," he said. "I'm having a great time with the daughter, and the mother is cooking for me." But the father came back and Armin was homeless again. He ran into a Persian friend, and they became roommates. "It was me and him and the world was wide open," he said. He acquired a taste for LSD. "It was really about going out there and finding sort of God within music," he said.

After a while, however, he found he couldn't finish his sentences. He quit the acid and decided to try his hand at acting. So in 1992, he moved to New York with his Japanese girlfriend, a model who supported him as he got fired from several waiter jobs. Things picked up when he got hired as a host at the nightclubs Chaos and Lotus. Ms. Sacco, owner of Lot 61, told him she was opening a new nightclub; it would have room for about 150 people but just 11 tables, and each table would be expected to spend $500 and up as a "bottle fee." She wanted Armin as the door maestro.

He still likes it, but the downside's been getting to him. He estimates that he's been in 10 fights. One night, a son of the discount brokerage millionaire Charles Schwab showed up and, according to newspaper reports, attacked Armin. The guy was charged with assault, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. Another time, a rejected guy said his uncle was "a very important guy" and that the next time he came, Armin would not only let him in but perform fellatio on him. "I think he was well deserved to get a slap," Armin said. "I gave him a slap. Then he ran away like a little girl."

The most serious threat came from some henchmen of a supposed "connected" guy. Armin was going home on his bike when a car pulled up next to him. The thugs told him that if he didn't let their boss in next time, Armin wouldn't look the same anymore. The connected guy showed up at the door of Bungalow 8 a few nights later. Armin took him aside and told him know that he had survived war, revolution and a refugee camp.

"Now I have a lot to lose," he told the man. "I want to go where I want to go in life, but when it comes down to it, I'm not really afraid of anybody."

The gangster tried to make friends, but Armin still wouldn't let him in. But, over time, they worked something out, and now the guy comes in once in a while with no more than one person.

As far as celebrities go, Armin likes actors Kevin Costner ("gracious") and Benicio Del Toro, but not many others. He doesn't get on with Puff Daddy or Paris Hilton. The celebrity he most dislikes might be actor John Corbett, who played the tall slacker Aidan on Sex and the City. Mr. Corbett showed up one night; Armin had no idea who he was.

"He was acting quite cocky, and he came with nine people on a busy night," Armin said. "I said, 'Let me see what I can do for you.' I go inside, clear off a table, and I came out and said, 'O.K.' I'm about to open the rope and he grabs my face and slaps it, Italian-style. I hate people when they touch me. And he says, 'I'll tell you something. You just fucked up, right? You will never fucking see me here again.'

"I had to push him back to let him know to never, ever put his hand on me," he continued. "And I'm glad that he didn't step up, because I would definitely have cracked his jaw."

Armin said his back-up guys at Bungalow, who are African-American, are regularly called the N-word by those denied entry.

"It's amazing-I didn't think there's that much racism that goes on in America," he continued. "In New York, there's a lot of racism."

On his three days off, he spends time with his current girlfriend, an Australian model with whom he owns an apartment in the East Village. But "as soon as I put my face back at the door, it just feels like this whole drama starts again," he said. "And most of it comes from the insanity of people being on drugs and alcohol. I'm more a loner now than I've ever been in my life. Besides seeing my girlfriend, I really just want to be left alone. Just sit somewhere and read and not have one word with anybody."

Lately he's been thinking about focusing on acting. He's done some independent movies and plays, auditioned for Alexander and Miami Vice. One problem is, he keeps getting typecast.

"Drug dealer or terrorist, drug dealer and terrorist," he said. "The biggest racist organization I've ever come across is Hollywood, as liberal as they like to sound."

If acting doesn't work out, he's had offers to run his own club.

"I feel like once I say yes to that, it's going to take me away from art," he said.

"I really learn a lot about greed and all that stuff at Bungalow," he continued. "Celebrity plays a major role in people's lives. We look up to them, we want to be their friends, and we get part of our identity through them, and it's sad."

He said he's learned a lot about the mating habits of Americans.

"Sex in Europe, I feel like it's almost like having a coffee," he said. "In America, people talk about and fantasize about sex more than they do it. I've always been attracted to non-American women. Where I come from, when the women get older, your respect for them grows more and more and more. You celebrate as people get older. In Europe, it's sort of sexy-the line around your eyes makes you very sexy and interesting. In America, we always find things wrong with ourselves. As women get older here, they lose their power. We're living in a culture where we're looking up to Paris Hilton."

It was 3:15 a.m. Armin was ignoring a dozen people outside Bungalow. There were two young women who didn't fit in: too denim, too New Jersey, too Bleecker Street. "We already went through this an hour ago. There's nothing I can do, sorry," Armin told them. "What it takes is a reservation; that's what it takes."

By 3:30 a.m. they were in full masochistic meltdown.

"But everyone's leaving right now," the redheaded woman reasoned.

"Sweetheart, I'm trying to just be as polite as possible," Armin said. "We don't have any room, sorry."

"For two girls? We're not guys."

"Even for half a girl."

Disco, a 6-foot-7, 300-pound bouncer, stepped forward.

"Even for two midgets," he said.

Just then, three fancy blondes were let in.

"This is bullshit," the redhead said to her friend. "I wish I was in the meatpacking district right now."

They asked to be let in again.

Armin took over. "Let me explain to you one thing," he said. "When you wake up in the morning tomorrow, and you're having your brunch, and you and your friend are going to talk about your night before-is it going to feel good to say you stood in front of a club for hour and a half?"

At 3:50 a.m., two sexy girls who had been waiting patiently and quietly were allowed in. At 4 a.m., Armin went inside to ask people to leave. At 4:10 a.m., he got on his bicycle and rode home.

-George Gurley

I should note that although the film has been very favorably reviewed by most of my esteemed colleagues, audiences have not flocked to see it because it's been described-more or less accurately-as 80 minutes of pure talk almost entirely between two characters, Celine (Ms. Delpy) and Jesse (Mr. Hawke).

These same two characters had talked up a storm nine years earlier during an overnight encounter in Vienna in Mr. Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995). As I recall, I wasn't overwhelmed by their first talky entanglement, though I continued to be moderately impressed by Mr. Link-later's seemingly quixotic attempt to bring articulate dialogue back to the movies at the expense of action, spectacle and MTV kinetics.

Indeed, much of the low-rent independent-film movement has made an aesthetic virtue out of its limited means. Ever since his Slacker put Austin, Tex., on the maverick-movie map in 1991, Mr. Linklater has served as spokesman for a new batch of disaffected youth-a group that has lacked any common cause to rally around. Up to now, a lot of his work has been hit and miss, so I wasn't prepared for what I encountered in Before Sunset , at a lightly attended noontime screening at a lower Manhattan multiplex.

What I wasn't prepared for were the long, lyrical camera movements through the streets of the most accessibly beautiful city in the world. The Ophulsian amplitude of the spectacle was completely sustained by the shifting moods of the two former lovers, who try to strike one light note after another and fail, miserable and painfully. Mr. Linklater and his two creative leads have managed a miraculous transformation of the characters from once-callow lovers into grown-ups teetering on the edge of eternity.

Some reviewers have compared this film to the prolonged stunt that was Louis Malle's My Dinner with André (1981), written by its two principals, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, as a series of conversational power struggles. The audience-pleasing turnaround by the less presumptuous Shawn character over the ideologically overbearing Gregory is a much easier contrivance, and one that justifies the self-indulgence of the project. But nothing is really at stake for Mr. Malle's two conversational combatants. By contrast, Celine and Jesse find themselves on the edge of a cliff by the final fade-out.

Part of the surprise of Before Sunset can be attributed to its initially inauspicious premise. At the end of the first movie, the two were supposed to reunite in Vienna six months after their initial encounter; Jesse showed up but Celine didn't. At the start of the new film, Jesse finds himself in a Paris bookshop as part of the book tour for his best-selling novel-based, of course, on the events depicted in Before Sunrise . This is a big stretch, even for the long arm of coincidence, but in a way it makes sense: If Jesse were ever to meet up with Celine again, it would be in Paris, not Vienna. Still, can the movie survive the burden of all the expository back story needed to bring the two former lovers up to date? It does, and then some, as I have already indicated.

Along the way, Mr. Linklater performs prodigies of invention with the time and space coordinates of the mise en scène . His is the subtlest form of filmmaking, which is to say it's made to look and sound effortlessly minimal. Yet it is also marvelously fragile-as if at any moment the sheer improbability of the situation is going to blow up in our faces with a disillusioning blast of common sense.

After all, Jesse has a wife and little boy in New York, and Celine has a lover, a war photographer, whom she tolerates only because he is away on foreign assignments most of the time. She has never been able to connect permanently with any man since that fateful night in Vienna. Jesse's marriage is far from idyllic, but he is content to spend his remaining years watching his little boy grow up. The two lovers discover, to their amazement, that they were both living in New York for several years at the same time without ever running into each other. But neither character broods over the vagaries of chance. Jesse, in particular, has been meditating lately on his own mortality and confesses with some embarrassment that he once entered a Trappist retreat. He was pleasantly surprised to discover that the monks were a cheerful lot who never tired of wishing him well. No Sturm and Drang there.

Still, most of the burden of self-analysis and self-recapitulation falls on Celine, as if she were talking aloud in a desperate attempt to chart her own future. In the few glimpses we are given of Celine and Jesse from the first film, it is clear that Ms. Delpy's face has changed more than Mr. Hawke's. Her features are thinner and less lush; it's as if she's grown out of her youthful vanity and is preparing for more rigorously existential challenges.

There is a breathtaking moment when Celine makes a furtive, caressing gesture toward Jesse's head while he is looking out the limo window, then withdraws it hastily when he begins turning back. It's a subtle sign, and even in the midst of her tirades against ex-lovers, Celine notes that they have all credited her with teaching them to respect women-though they've invariably applied the lesson not to Celine, but to the women they've gone on to marry.

As the time nears for Jesse to catch his plane to New York-and take him out of Celine's life again, perhaps forever-she intuitively prolongs the suspense with two improvised pieces of performance art that serve to bring the film to an exquisitely metaphorical conclusion. I doubt that there will be a sequel to this sequel, nor should there be. Before Sunset is perfect as it is.

Raiders of the Global Economy

The Corporation , a nonfiction film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott and Joel Bakan, based on Mr. Bakan's book, The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power , is the winner of the Joris Ivens Special Jury Prize at the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival, the World Cinema Documentary Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival, and the People's Choice Award at the Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto International Film Festivals.

Among its more familiar corporation-demonizing interviewees are Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. So why, after 145 minutes of very ambitiously conceptualized Canadian agitprop, did I feel weary and depressed by the sheer futility of it all? At times, I felt as if I was trapped at a Ralph Nader rally; at other times, I couldn't help thinking of the German Communists in the last days of the Weimar Republic, confidently predicting that "After Hitler, us" as a rationale for letting the Weimar Republic perish without any resistance on their part. They were right, of course: The Communist Party came into power over a big chunk of Germany after Hitler perished, but only after millions and millions of people had been slaughtered.

If Fahrenheit 9/11 has been demeaned as preaching to the converted, The Corporation can be demeaned as preaching to the converted with advanced degrees in rabble-rousing. Speaking of which, I'm petrified by the thought of left-wing crazies pulling another Chicago '68 on the streets of New York during the Republican National Convention over the upcoming Labor Day weekend. All right, I admit it: I'm a centrist by temperament and conviction. I believe in voting for the lesser evil now over waiting for the absolute good of the future. I also believe that things can get a lot worse before they get better. And yes, I believe in incrementalism, and I believe in America.

However, The Corporation is very well informed about the legal origins of corporations and their current near omnipotence. The film outlines how the judiciary treats corporations as individuals, with all the requisite Constitutional protections, thus perverting the intentions of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which sought to protect liberated slaves, by giving corporations the same protections of due process. An environmental wrinkle is added to the traditional Marxist rhetoric against the capitalist system, but the word "capitalism" is seldom employed in The Corporation . To do so might've induced viewers to think about alternative systems, like socialism or communism. Nor is there much discussion of the ameliorative powers of representative democracy. There is no suggestion that Americans can ever use the ballot box to remove an oppressive government: We are all too brainwashed by corporate advertising to know what we really want.

This is all true, to a certain point. As much as anyone else, my tastes in consumer goods have been shaped by advertising. But where else in the world do I go to find a justly governed realm that's free of the brutal machinations of multinational corporations? I am too old to forage in the jungle. This is the only system I know, and if I'm farther from the top and closer to the bottom than I realize-like most of my equally deluded compatriots-I console myself with a vague awareness of the totality of human history, geography and sociology since the blessed days of the Garden of Eden. Everything I read about antiquity and the Middle Ages reeks of injustice and inequality and corruption.

So what do "we" do now? And how many of "us" does it take to make an effective "we"? The makers of The Corporation point to instances of group action-decertifying an irresponsible corporation in one locality, and restoring the water supply in a South American country to public control after a multinational company gouged the citizens for its own profit. But the movie really gets its adrenaline going with shots of milling crowds in the streets screaming and shouting for justice. Even so, no one goes so far as to preach the virtues of revolution, once such a rousing word for May Day speeches. Nowadays, even this workingman's holiday has gone the way of the dodo.

One can agree with The Corporation on the dangerously growing power of multinational corporations, which hide under the cloak of "globalization" and "free trade." And there should be no argument that the earth itself is imperiled by the excesses of a global manufacturing and consumer culture. As Walt Kelly's immortal Pogo once observed: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." How much environmental damage is caused by poor people in the Amazon rain forest chopping down trees to grow crops? Can a majority of the American people ever consent to be deprived of their gas guzzlers? If we all universally agreed to lead a more Spartan existence-regardless of the discomfort-I would have more hope for the future.

We're all impatient for the memoir to evolve-who needs more cross-eyed mirror-gazing?-but don't expect the first stabs at a less narrowly focused generation of autobiographical writing to be 20-20, or even particularly legible. Case in point is Walter Abish's Double Vision , a memoir that doesn't content itself with a single narrative but ambitiously seeks to lend resonance and perspective to its subject through stereoscopic storylines. Mr. Abish tells two stories meant to enlarge each other: one an account of how he and his Jewish parents fled Vienna in 1938, the other a travelogue of his first visit back to Vienna in the 1980's, a few years after he published his prize-winning novel, How German Is It (1980). Like many pioneering efforts, the new book is deeply flawed, but the flaws are interesting, and in their own way add to the experience.

First, because they are severe, the shortcomings. For a writer generally considered "elegant," Mr. Abish here uses English so infelicitously that you wonder how long he's been speaking it. The book is filled with sentences you have to slug your way out of, like this description of his "exuberant" uncle Phoebus: "Even his dubious integrity in business matters excited in me a sympathetic response-for wasn't Phoebus confirming my picture of him as the black sheep, who finally, as Phoebus did, moved to Sydney, Australia?" Mr. Abish's syntax is so clumsy, his phraseology so convoluted and even his word choice so frequently questionable (is "unappealing" the right word for torture that includes the plucking out of fingernails?), that vast swaths of Double Vision read like a bad translation of itself.

There's also the egregious overuse of the rhetorical question. "Isn't history a form of story telling?" he asks on page 8. "How could I possibly have apprehended that I was being rigorously trained to be a writer? … Was I not being trained in obduracy to wage war on the impediments, such as the blank pages, I was to face years later? Was I not being trained to surmount the hurdles of the text? Did they not see it? How could they have missed it? … Did I not detest myself as a result? … Is it any wonder I sought refuge in play?" he asks-also on page 8. When he's in full throat, the Old World oratory ringing out, Mr. Abish can pack a half-dozen or more self-interrogatives onto a single page. The effect is comical, if you happen to enjoy having an Austrian grandfather clutch you by the shoulder and spray your face with magniloquence.

Some of Mr. Abish's observations have outlived their sell-by date: "Until recently I considered the declaration 'Arbeit Macht Frei' above the [Dachau] concentration camp gates as more malevolently ironic than a solemn avowal," he writes. "I now understand that the intent was primarily utilitarian. For … the misleading signs were essential to the smooth operation of the facilities … intended to allay the apprehension of the new arrivals." As if to make up for these stale banalities, other observations are overblown: "As I left the monument, an exhausted collarless German shepherd limped past, trailing blood …. Clearly, it has to be a message beamed at me!" Relentlessly, everything must signify, until by force of habit he turns the grilling back on himself: "I keep persuading myself that everything I see, every conversation I have, is potential material for future use. But is that so? Most exchanges are oddly dissatisfying; it's as if an unseen caution prevails-on my part? on theirs?"

Wait, it gets worse before it gets better. To say that most of the characters in this book are unlikeable is letting their creator off too easily; it's more that Mr. Abish perversely denies them even a molecule of likeability. One after the other they are supercilious, spiteful, petty, humorless, often sneering and always inscrutably ironic. Irony, in fact, is the prevailing mood, when it doesn't surrender to lassitude. ("There is, I suppose, a certain satisfaction to be derived from the fact that my earliest memory is that of being bored.") Is the reader to blame if he's put off? Precisely how much alienation can we be expected to tolerate? Is that question unfair? What is unfairness, anyway? Why isn't it capitalized, the way it would be in German? How German Would That Be, Huh?

This is the stand-up version of Teutonism, less Fassbinder than Saturday Night Live .

And yet … and yet, it's all of a piece. Consciously or not, the strained syntax serves to underscore the disaffection Mr. Abish suffers-having been uprooted at the age of 6-as both a geographical exile and an exile from his native tongue. The tone-deafness adds to the poignancy of a protagonist who is at home nowhere. And the parade of creeps who never get warmer than a lover with "a wan smile of chagrin"-who else was Mr. Abish supposed to encounter, having grown up isolated from other children, suffocated by bourgeois trappings and afflicted by the sense that he was the wrong child for his parents, a remote, grudging mother and a weak, embarrassed father? "I had known that I was merely a capricious factor and not the ineluctable concept that fed their notion of a family," he remarks with wooden pathos.

Personally, I blame the mom, an aloof, psychically numb character. But if the almost inhuman restraint he endured as a child cramps his emotional connection to the reader, and the stilted syntax mirrors the discomfiture he continued to feel as a displaced adult, the architecture of the book nonetheless comes to the rescue. The book is constructed in alternating chapters: "writer-to-be" sections (young Walter fleeing Vienna for Italy, France, Shanghai and then Israel) taking turns with "writer" sections, in which the adult author returns to his native ground on a kind of extended book tour. What we get are fascinating peekaboo glimpses. A raucous young Tel Aviv, for instance, is filled with colorful embezzlers and spies and Holly Golightly women (barely fleshed out, but maybe that's how it is with Holly Golightly women), a place where thievery is rampant and discourtesy is worn as a badge and "equated with candor," while politeness is "rejected as servile and cosmopolitan-reminders of a disdained European past."

Even better are the rare shots of Shanghai during and after the Allied bombing, when the entire city "lay there, submissive, patiently waiting to be occupied, waiting to place its bottomless resources, its harbor, its bars and whorehouses at the feet of the victors. Shanghai waited the way a courtesan, having just rid herself of a former lover, might timorously await the arrival of the next, still uncertain as to his taste, his experience, his desire for love, determined, however, at all costs, to overcome any doubts she may have had about her fading beauty."

If all his sentences were that pretty, we'd have no problem. As it is, however, we have to rely on the memoir's innovative structure, which lends a kind of expressive credence to the content: Mr. Abish not only gives us acute glimpses of a world in flux, but also has us experience them viscerally through the back-and-forth configuration of the narrative. Match a 1980's scene of self-congratulatory Germans with a 1938 scene in which Vienna is being invigorated by Nazism, and suddenly the whole is larger than the sum of its parts.

It's ballsy for a man who wears an eye patch to talk about double vision. But Mr. Abish has proven himself a ballsy writer more than once before. His latest book gives us greater depth perception than a single line of focus would provide, and proves that the memoir is a more flexible form than it has lately seemed. Double Vision hints at what a new generation of memoir might be capable of-though when it comes to fulfilling its own promise, it blinks big time.

Daniel Asa Rose, former arts and culture editor of the Forward , is the author most recently of Hiding Places: A Father and His Sons Retrace Their Family's Escape from the Holocaust (Simon and Schuster).