Schizopolis

“In the event that you find certain sequences or ideas confusing, please bear in mind that this is your fault, not ours, and you will need to see the picture again and again until you understand everything,” actor, writer, director, auteur Steven Soderbergh addresses to the audience before a movie theater screen at the beginning of his unconventional, nonlinear, bizarre Dadaist film, Schizopolis. Soderbergh achieves this wacky Dadaist tone in the narrative by breaking the fourth wall, playing out his character’s infidelity to his wife and his wife’s infidelity to him from three different perspectives (two of which are his) in three totally different languages/modes of speech, intercutting between an amateur film crew interviewing someone and struggling to make their indie film (a wink at indie filmmaking), and cinematography that insinuates what’s reality and what’s a daydream, amongst a handful of other techniques and devices. In one of the first scenes where we meet Soderbergh’s speech-writer character for a self-help faith-healing demagogue, Fletcher Munson, he listens to a woman tell him how his religion changed her life, and in the middle of the scene, it cuts to a grainy underexposed Bolex-style shot where he pounces on her and kisses her so hard that he sucks a tooth out of her mouth. When it cuts back, it’s apparent with no explanation at all he was daydreaming. Even Soderbergh’s blasé narration accentuates just how dull and fundamentally human his character is; he spans the entire life of his protagonist, beginning with his memory of being born, an out-of-body experience he has playing right-field when he’s nine (three runs score), and when he’s fifteen, comprehending his own mortality--all this before the credits. When one of his coworkers lights a cigarette and Soderbergh tells him he shouldn’t, we leap into the future when the coworker literally coughs himself to death in a hospital bed. The first time we meet Munson’s wife, Soderbergh writes all subtext out and his characters speak almost on a hypertextual level; his wife makes a move in bed--Munson: “Ooh, really well-rehearsed speech about workload and stress. Genuine sorrow. Truthful sounding promises of future satisfaction.” As the narrative unfolds from the perspective of Munson’s dentist doppleganger also played by Soderbergh, Jeffrey Korchek, we learn that he is having an affair with Munson’s wife (Soderbergh expresses that he can’t believe he’s cheating with his own wife). After Korcheck coerces her into leaving her husband--Munson--the movie starts over from the beginning, except this time Munson’s dialogue is in Japanese, proving Soderbergh’s point that it doesn’t matter what he is saying, we’ve heard it all by now. It then skips to the end where after Munson’s wife decides to move in with Korcheck, Korcheck breaks if off with her for one of his patients--in Italian.

Cut between this central narrative are wacky transitional narratives involving a pantsless man getting chased by male nurses, a very dry interview with a man who comments on the immaturity of the filmmakers taping him, fake breaking-news bits commenting on news coverage of nonsensical bureaucratic issues, and a weird narrative about Soderbergh directing this incredibly self-aware parody of indie films where his lead actor who spouts non-sequiturs is snatched up by agents. Soderbergh leaves gaping holes in his plot that he either returns to or references--sometimes tongue-in-cheek--later on, or in the case of his doppleganger that somehow has an omniscient point of view of everything that’s already happened in the life of his counterpart, doesn’t explain at all. He does this to successfully achieve a movie about a simple affair that transcends most other films about affairs. This narrative is barely told to us even once through between all three points of view of the situation, and yet because so much is left out, he puts it to our imaginations to connect the dots and fill in the blanks. Most of his chracters don’t even have names; one is simply refered to as a joke as “Nameless Numberhead Man,” and that name sticks for the duration of the film. It’s almost as if his character is such a blank slate that any one of us could substitute in for him in his dilemmas. He uses compression of time before the inciting incident of the narrative to boil down the entire life of his protagonist up to that point to a few simple moments, and after the film to explain the silly details of the rest of his character’s seemingly incidental life. Meanwhile, the other hour and twenty minutes are spent expanding time as we scrutinize a pretty normal, somewhat depressing, very human story about two men (both Soderbergh) who fantasize about the women they can’t have at their boring jobs, who don’t want the woman who at one point or another was in love with both of them--told in self-aware gibberish, from the perspective of a doppleganger, and dubbed over in Japanese and Italian. Not only does it establish Soderbergh as an auteur with an inventive flair for the absurd, it also achieves an off-the-wall, Dadaist tone that advances the comedy and really makes the punchlines zing. He also makes a movie that is almost incomprehensible after only one viewing, but that still has narrative progression that washes over you.