Wristcutters: A Love Story (2007)

Goran Dukic's Wristcutters: A Love Story arrives from 2006 with the unhurried confidence of a film that knows exactly how strange it is and declines to apologize. Zia kills himself, wakes in a grey afterlife reserved for suicides, and learns that the accommodations are worse than the life he left: no stars, no smiles, second-rate bar bands. When word arrives that his ex-girlfriend has also done the deed, he and a Russian musician named Eugene drive off to find her. This is a road movie set in purgatory, adapted from an Etgar Keret short story, and it treats its premise as a mild inconvenience.

The cultural inventory here is thin, and the film's defenders should not pretend otherwise. The cast is white and stays white, with the Russian immigrant family supplying the only variation on the theme. Mikal, the hitchhiker who insists she arrived by mistake, has a stubborn streak and drives the search for the people in charge, though the screenplay shows no interest in gender politics. Nobody discusses race, climate, class, or the body. There is no sermon, no lesson, no moment where the audience is invited to examine its own complicity in anything. The film's theology is a joke about apathy: miracles occur at Kneller's camp only when nobody cares whether they happen, which is as close as this material comes to a thesis.

So we are left with a shaggy, melancholy comedy about connection, and it earns its cult following honestly. Tom Waits wanders through as an undercover bureaucrat. Gogol Bordello plays on the soundtrack. The whole enterprise has the texture of a generational shrug, and the shrug is the point. A viewer seeking moral instruction will leave empty-handed. A viewer seeking a black hole under the passenger seat, swallowing cassette tapes forever, will be well served.