SIGNS & WONDERS ( 1/2)
Tedious, shallow Euro-pretension. Running time: 108 minutes. Unrated (sex and brief seminudity). At the Quad, 13th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.
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SMUG, often tedious, and comically crude in its attack on the alleged crassness of America’s global dominance, Jonathan Nossiter’s “Signs & Wonders” is an almost perfect example of 1970s-style Euro-pretension.
The story of an American abroad who damages the people around him because of his naive self-obsession, it’s one of those films which strains to connect an individual’s faults to those of his society.
This particular ugly American lives in Athens, Greece, rather than Graham Greene’s Vietnam.
You can tell Alec (Stellan Skarsgard) has everything all wrong because he’s always shot standing in front of a McDonalds or Pizza Hut or shopping in a mall.
Marjorie (Charlotte Rampling), the wife he abandons, has a taste for more authentic places and does her shopping in the bazaar.
Alec also lives by portents – when he sees his former mistress, Katherine (Deborah Kara Unger), by chance on a ski slope, he assumes it’s a sign they should be together and proceeds to leave his wife and family.
Worse still, he’s a solipsist, attributing cosmic significance to everything that happens to him while remaining foolishly, crassly unaware of the way his own actions affect other people.
After some time in the States, Alec comes back to Athens to try to win Marjorie back.
The problem is that Marjorie is now seeing someone else: Andreas (Dimitris Katalifos) a Greek journalist who was tortured by the Colonels’ dictatorship in the ’70’s.
As Alec pursues Marjorie, bad things begin to happen to Andreas. Is Alec behind them, is his daughter, or is it, gasp, the CIA?
It’s always a pleasure to see Rampling and she’s as good, and as lovely, as ever.
It makes it more of a shame that writer Lasdun and director Nossiter ensure that every confrontation between the characters rings with artificiality.