It’s not often that two monumental works of art fall in your lap within 24 hours (unless you’re a clumsy custodian at the Louvre), but something like that happened to me last week when I picked up Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8 the night before attending a screening of Synecdoche, New York. Other than this coincidence of timing, the two wouldn’t appear to have much to do with each other. The former is just a collection of outtakes in much the same way Moby Dick is just a fishing story, from an artist who has nothing left to prove but keeps proving it anyway. The latter is the most ambitious, challenging, frustrating and thrilling American movie since I’m Not There, which happened to be about Bob Dylan (see, it all comes full circle) – maybe even since Mulholland Drive. Those two films are good points of reference, actually; if you hated them both, Synecdoche probably isn’t a movie for you.
Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut shares with those movies a dreamworld logic, puzzle-like narrative, identity confusion and a filmmaking intelligence engaged with the material on a sub-atomic level. In each case I walked out of the theater feeling as if I was setting foot on a different world than the one I’d left two hours earlier.
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