SIFF Week Two: Picks and Pans

He's not exactly what you'd call a master of suspense, but Apichatpong Weerasethakul's enigmas are anything but predictable. Known to his pals as Joe, the Thai avant-popster returns two years after the critical success Tropical Malady with another two-part brain tickler. Are these parallel tales a Buddhist romance in which dual sets of more or less congruent personalities experience two different sets of lives working in two different hospitals? An attempt at 3-D narrative depth? To add to the mystery, the filmmaker has called the movie, commissioned by the New Crowned Hope festival to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, a story about his parents before they met. (NR) J. HOBERMAN SIFF Cinema: 9:30 p.m. Mon., June 4; 4:30 p.m. Thurs., June 7.

2 Days in Paris

Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and now...Before Sunset With a Vengeance? Whatever the label, the Richard Linklater–less Julie Delpy now steps behind the camera to direct a relationship flick that's hardly original but intermittently enjoyable. She and Adam Goldberg play a quarrelsome New York couple visiting her folks in Paris, a city not treated too differently than in Art Buchwald's Don't Drink the Water (or Woody Allen's TV adaptation of same). In other words, a familiar place fraught with light comedy, cultural incomprehension, and gags about hygiene and food—all of which Goldberg has down pat. ("This whole city smells like lamb," he complains.) Plus fat American tourists in Bush T-shirts; Goldberg even wears a Gitmo shirt, just so we know where things stand politically. Delpy's directing style is rather willfully loopy and scattered, like her character. Neither she nor 2 Days emulsifies into anything substantial, yet the film works as a kind of dithering emotional diary. (R) BRIAN MILLER Egyptian: 8:30 p.m. Sat., June 2. Lincoln Square: 7 p.m. Tues., June 5.

Woman on the Beach

Sony Pictures Classics

Angel-A

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More About

• Charles Nelson Reilly
• Luc Besson
• Jamel Debbouze
• BRIAN MILLER Neptune
• Adam Goldberg

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He's hardly a household name, but South Korea's Hong Sang-soo (Woman Is the Future of Man) has become a festival champion (Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors played SIFF '01). Like its predecessors, Woman on the Beach is a deadpan, melancholy erotic comedy. The typical Hong situation—a callow thirtysomething male ambivalently woos a self-possessed if vulnerable woman—sounds like midperiod Woody Allen, but Hong's elliptical, riff-based humor, usually predicated on alcohol-induced disinhibition, is drier and more pointed. Only one of Hong's movies has previously snared a distributor; Woman on the Beach, which could be his best, remains in play. (NR) J. HOBERMAN Egyptian: 9:30 p.m. Sun., June 3. Pacific Place: 4 p.m. Tues., June 5.