Giamatti gets metaphysical in smart comedy "Souls"

By Justin Lowe

PARK CITY, Utah (Hollywood Reporter) - A dark comedy with a piquant metaphysical bite, writer-director Sophie Barthes' assured feature "Cold Souls" imaginatively joins a high-concept script with a distinctive visual style.

The film, a narrative competition title at Sundance, has ample potential to go the distance on the festival circuit and on to a focused theatrical release with the backing of an attentive distributor.

Barthes' film turns on the conceit of Paul Giamatti playing himself in the role of a dejected and anxious stage actor. Late in rehearsals for a New York production of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," Giamatti is experiencing escalating emotional and physical distress, while finding it increasingly difficult to separate himself from the play's title character. By chance he discovers a "soul storage" company, which for a fee extracts his chickpea-size essence and stores it in a bank-like vault at a lab on Roosevelt Island.

Although the procedure makes Paul uncomfortable by raising impenetrable philosophical questions, he feels immediately lighter and less stressed. But before long, he finds that getting by on the five percent of his soul that's left leaves him feeling hollow and lifeless. At the suggestion of the lab's Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn), Paul rents the soul of a supposed Russian poet as a substitute for his own.

This turns out to be a bad idea, as he's plagued by despair and strange visions of the previous owner's life. Attempting to retrieve his soul from Flintstein, he discovers that it's missing -- stolen by Nina (Dina Korzun), a Russian soul-trafficking mule. Paul persuades Nina to take him to St. Petersburg, where his spirit has been transferred into the body of a young soap opera actress, the wife of Nina's thuggish Russian boss. In order to retrieve his soul, Paul must decide how badly he wants his old life back, and how far he's willing to go to get it.

Comparisons to "Being John Malkovich" may be inevitable, but Barthes displays a self-assured narrative and visual style, immersing her characters in a mysterious world where appearance and reality disconcertingly diverge. At the same time, she amusingly tweaks the contradictions of Paul's Jungian journey, exposing the inherent absurdity of his existential dilemma.

Giamatti is aptly cast, playing his own persona with awkward anxiety and suitably skewed humor. As the Russian soul smuggler, Korzun finds the right blend of determination and bewilderment suitable to her strange task.

Barthes capably directs the cast with a combination of cool detachment and persistent scrutiny, while impressionistic dream sequences lend an air of melancholy lyricism, abetted by cinematographer Andrij Parekh's handheld camerawork and evocative lighting.

Reuters/Hollywood Reporter