The Exchange

A man walks into his own apartment in the middle of the day while his wife is napping there, and it seems he is intrigued by the chance to see the components of his life and not to affect them. The ghostliness of his presence prompts him to experiment with the contrast of a limited, manageable impact-- pushing a napkin-holder off a table. More and more, he withdraws from interaction with his everyday world. Sometimes he hides and observes, other times he just hides. Sometimes he makes noise where there is no one to hear. Is this exciting cinema? Is it relevant? Will it draw audiences? Being an Israeli-German coproduction, maybe THE EXCHANGE, with its emphasis on alienation and inaction, will go over better in Germany, since Israelis are a rather busy and involved population. You need to be willing, to some extent, to enjoy observation as a substitute for action, the way the protagonist does. But the bottom line is that with so little happening, and not all of it clearly motivated, I doubt that the script would have been shot at all if the creator weren't recently responsible for the beloved film THE BAND'S VISIT, and I consider myself lucky to have caught the film on its commercial opening night because I'm not sure it will last out the week.

I've seen a lot of films in recent years that seem to come from the Michael Haneke School of detached, forensic, precise observation of the lives of the characters. In a few cases, this style is married with an off-beat, slightly surreal comedy, something I associate with Haneke's fellow Austrian, Peter Handke. I'm thinking of this film, and of DOGTOOTH, by Lanthimos. Both DOGTOOTH and the EXCHANGE have a wry, ironic but very original way of looking at the world. In the EXCHANGE, the lead character undergoes some kind of breakdown that is also a transformation; he can no longer look at life in a "normal" way, he begins to see unusual patterns in things, he begins to observe things differently, and to be aware of himself observing things, observing the observer; something that surely echoes with his work as a physicist, where it is now clear that the fact of observing phenomena actually changes their state. Although Kolirin doesn't seem to know where to go with this idea (the ending is good, but not exciting) this provides a fascinating, funny and weird cinema experience... thought-provoking and odd.