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Clouds

2000, Movie, NR, 95 mins

Clouds: Review

The cinema of ideas is not dead: Witness this leisurely meditation on love, connection and spiritual healing. Physics professor Robert St. John (Michael Patrick Gaffney), who's haunted by the girl he loved and lost as a child, is working on a theory — something about defining "the laws that hold true in different dimensions of reality." Wan and disconnected, Robert loves the purity and rigor of mathematics, and has no patience for paradoxes and ambiguity. Taking a leave of absence from teaching, he moves into a shabby oceanfront apartment complex somewhere near San Francisco in hopes that solitude will allow him to refine his amorphous theory. But there's no escaping the distraction of other people: Robert's landlady (Patricia Ann Rubens) is a religious chatterbox. Neighbor Tab (Richard Barrows), a successful artist who stopped painting out of disgust with the crass New York City art scene, regularly drags Robert into marathon (sometime pot-fueled) gabfests. And the mysterious Beatrice (Jennifer Jordan Day), who signs herself "B" (dashing off the initial so it looks just like a lopsided heart), hints enigmatically that she and Robert may have met somewhere before, soon invading his heavily symbolic dreams. "You must learn to love, we must learn to love, the world must learn to love," she whispers, articulating the film's principal theme. Beautifully photographed in glistening B&W, playwright Don Thompson's feature-film writing/directing debut wears its debt to European art cinema of the '60s proudly. But it's undermined by nonprofessional acting (though director Rob Nilsson turns in a nice performance as a thoughtful bartender) and clunky dialogue that leans heavily to the schematic debate — science vs. religion, art vs. commerce and the like. It has the air of a particularly accomplished student film, by a student whose philosophical concerns outweigh his interest in narrative filmmaking. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh