Waking Life. Written and directed by Richard Linklater. With Wiley Wiggins, Richard Linklater, Kim Krizan, Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy, Steven Soderbergh, Steven Prince, Adam Goldberg, and Timothy (Speed) Levitch. A Fox Searchlight Pictures release. At the Avon.

It's virtually impossible to reproduce with any exactness the experience of seeing this animated film from Richard Linklater because the episodes tend to drift in and out of your brain, along with the buoyant, phantasmagoric images. What remains is the feeling of the movie -- a strange mixture of the whimsical, the cerebral, and the melancholy -- and its free-form, sea-swept visual style. Linklater shot the actors in high-definition digital video with handheld camcorders. Then the animator, Bob Sabiston, and his team took over. The last step was "painting" over the animated frames via Sabiston's pioneering computer program, providing a wash of color that ebbs and flows across the screen. Directing a production of a Tennessee Williams play once, I asked a costume designer to suggest the wavering glimpses of color in Monet and Turner paintings, and he came up with the brilliant idea of painting the women's gowns so the light picked up layers of color in mysterious, peek-a-boo swirls. That's what Waking Life looks like. Everything on the screen is permanently afloat.

The college-age protagonist of the film (voiced by Wiley Wiggins) hitches a ride in a car that looks like a boat; when he's dropped off, he finds a note on the street that warns him, "Look to your right," and another car bears down on him before he can scamper out of the way. With this odd series of events Linklater drops his hero down a metaphorical rabbit hole. He awakens apparently unharmed, but he's locked in a dream he can't escape from, no matter how many times he opens his eyes and believes he's beginning a new waking day. Like Alice in Wonderland, he comes in contact with a succession of characters who discourse freely with him, as if they'd been doing so for years. Their conversation is taken off the supermarket shelves of philosophical ideas, both classical and popular, with the same topics resurfacing over and over: identity, communication, free will. A lecturer insists that existentialism is the philosophy of exuberance, not despair, because it enables us to create the path of our own lives. A young man explains that the role of the media is to put us at ease with the essential chaos of the world; then, apparently in protest against this glossing over of the truth, he immolates himself. A young woman talks about the impossibility of communication because words are so inadequate to express the feelings behind them, but she adds that the small, temporary connections we make amid all these grand failures are what we live for. As she speaks, the words that emerge from her mouth take on, briefly and magically, the shape of the ideas they're meant to suggest.

This enchanting movie seems without precedent or comparison. But it made me think of both Chris Marker's great 1983 Sans Soleil, a whirligig of images and reflections on the workings of memory, and James Toback's 1990 The Big Bang, a documentary in which he brings together a cross-section of highly articulate people of different ages and from different walks of life and encourages them to talk about God and sex and anything else that happens to come up. The inspiration for the notion of a man who can't wake up is clearly the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, especially "The Circular Ruins," where the narrator dreams a man, more and more each night -- and when he's done, he realizes that he himself is another man's dream. But the style of Waking Life is as far from Marker's or Toback's or Borges's as their styles are from one other. And the tone -- playful yet plaintive -- is distinctive to Linklater. You might recognize it from his 1995 Before Sunrise, the best romantic comedy of the last decade, in which Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy star as an American and a Parisienne who meet en route to Vienna, spend 36 impulsive hours together, and fall in love. (Hawke and Delpy both show up in Waking Life, voicing cartoon figures who are marvelous caricatures of them. Linklater himself and wife Kim Krizan -- his co-writer on Before Sunrise -- are also among the vocal cast.) This filmmaker often strikes out, but when he hits, he's capable of miracles.

Issue Date: November 2 - 8, 2001