A Parisian guy shaves his moustache and no one notices. When he irately mentions this to his wife, she says that he hasn't had a moustache for fifteen years, and begs him to please drop the matter, because he is scaring her.

A few days later his father calls and leaves a message on their answering machine to confirm their lunch date. The guy hears the message and erases it, but when he later mentions the lunch date to his wife she looks at him funny. Apparently his father is dead. After that, his wife and boss try to have him committed, but he escapes to Hong Kong, where he rides the ferries for a few days.

The whole time this stuff is happening there are strange clues that he did really shave his moustache. Did he?

"He's a visual director, not a narrative one," my buddy said after Solaryis was over, and this about sums it up. As storytelling the film is a muddle. Who is that little boy with Burton in the beginning? What happened to Kelvin's mother? Why do the Solaryists get only one visitor at a time, and sometimes none at all? And some of the conversation is tiresome too; a lot of the time it does sound, to borrow one character's phrase, like second-rate Dostoevsky.

But visually it is as interesting as films get. Tarkovsky has the uncanny ability to make you see still objects in a new light, as with the Brueghel painting, for instance, or the underwater objects scene in "Stalker." Some people complain about the pacing, but I find it refreshing to see someone take his time and just linger over the things in front of him (people who think Solaryis is slow, by the way, should watch the just-mentioned "Stalker," or "Day of Wrath" by Carl Th. Dreyer, both of which make this look like Die Hard 4).

I saw this one Sunday a month ago when it was playing for a limited weeklong run in Buffalo. There were two other people besides me in the theater, and one of them walked out after the first hour. And that was the most normal part.

Let me say up front that I am very ambivalent about David Lynch. I really liked Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive, and thought Eraserhead was intriguing. Blue Velvet and Lost Highway, on the other hand, felt like horseshit to me. In any case, Inland Empire is one of the good ones, and if anything it is like a longer, stranger, and angrier version of Mulholland Drive.

Imagine you have a vivid dream that is a bit creepy though more or less connected for a while. This would be like the first 60 minutes of IE. But then suppose it degenerated into a bunch of extremely creepy stuff that repeated itself without any connection whatsoever, and was intertwined with a bizarre dance number or two. This would be like the next 90 minutes. And then what if finally your dream seemed to return to its original theme, but everything was a bit off and you couldn't figure out what was going on exactly, and then it ended with an even longer bizarre dance number. This the last half hour. And oh, by the way, the whole thing would also be interspersed with scenes of a family of rabbit-people hanging out in its living room.

What redeems all of this is that there is a message in it towards the end, and that parts of it, especially the closing credit scene, are unforgettable. Believe it or not, I'm planning on seeing this again as soon as I get the chance.

A corrupt universe inhabited by wannabes, dealers, and duplicitous women. Film noir, or high school? It took a certain genius to bring the two together, though to tell the truth, I was a little bit worried when I heard about the premise of this movie. There are so many ways it could go wrong. Fortunately though Brick gets everything right: it is incredibly entertaining, occasionally hilarious, and technically very good as well. It manages to put its finger on a number of conventions of both the film noir and the high school universes while still telling a story that fully inhabits both. I can't imagine that I will ever again watch a film about just one or the other without a feeling of disappointment. A highly recommended diversion.

8/10