Jeremiah Zagar’s In a Dream premiered at SXSW in 2008, two months before Synecdoche, NY was unveiled at Cannes, but seen in the run up to its release in New York on Friday, Zagar’s family documentary pops out as a true-life analogue to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut. Dream’s counterpart to Caden Cotard is Isaiah Zagar, the filmmaker’s father and a mosaic mural artist who, in the film’s earliest frames, confesses to an attraction to the “gigantic.” As In a Dream unfolds (in three parts, detailing Jeremiah’s parents’ courtship and formation of a family life around the patriarch’s art practice, the eventual threats to their way of life and ultimately its tentative rebirth), more Synecdoche similarities emerge. Like the protagonist of Kaufman’s masterwork, Isaiah Zagar deals with the internal by projecting it on the external, making an art work that conquers a city, that blurs the line between public space and domestic, and that never ends. His work becomes an addiction that unwittingly distances him from the people he loves. Both films even feature protagonists who handle their own feces. Oddly enough, it’s the indie documentary, not the studio-released drama with an ensemble full of stars, that points to the possibility of a happy ending.
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