When Philippe Garrel’s most recent film premiered in competition at Cannes last year, it carried the French title La Frontière de l’aube; that was translated in English in the Cannes guide as Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. None of these titles give any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge. I named it as the best undistributed film of 2008; now, IFC is screening it theatrically in series at BAM in Brooklyn (starting tonight) and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (Saturday, March 14), before it premieres on VOD.

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James Gray’s Two Lovers, loosely based on a Dostoyevsky short story,  offers up the most penetrating examination of male immaturity American cinema has seen since Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love.

Beginning with a suicide attempt by Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix), it  depicts the thirtysomething Brooklynite’s life with his parents. After a nasty break-up, he’s retreated back to the comfort of their home. They push him towards Sandra (Vinessa Shaw), the daughter of a business associate, but he’s more attracted to  neighbor Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow). However, Michelle is prone to self-destructive behavior like passing out in nightclub bathrooms and carrying on an affair with a married man. Gray explores one of his favorite   themes: family life as a seductive trap. Unlike his first three films, Two Lovers is not a genre exercise, but it’s no less dark or moody because none of its characters packs a gun or works for the Mafia.

Spout talked to Gray in New York earlier this week, where he proved to have plenty to say about Dostoyevsky, Brighton Beach and why his films are more popular in France than the U.S.

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Rarely has movie love been handled with both the dreamy indulgence and the cynicism that James Grey pulls off in Two Lovers. It’s a pity that the film, which premiered nine months ago at Cannes and is now rolling out on VOD and in theaters via Magnolia, has been pegged in time as the allegedly final film of star Joaquin Phoenix. In this meditation on class passing and infinite adolescence, set mainly in Brighton Beach with a few giddy sojourns to Manhattan, Grey creates a mood pocket, as it were, that’s distinctly out of time. Working off a series of contrasts that’s very true to its New York setting, Two Lovers is implicitly concerned with the way romantic relationships give us an opportunity to slide back and forth across class lines; if that motion temporarily offers the potential for an erasal of personal history, our ultimate stations in life can’t be escaped.

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I don’t entirely buy James Grey’s Two Lovers, and typing this having just walked out of the far superior Un Conte De Noel, I feel strange even praising it. I freely admit that even as certain elements are effectively  thrilling in their depiction of tortured passion, it’s all put to the service of a narrative that is occasionally offensive in its total lack of surprise. But, but, but: after dozing on and off for the film’s first twenty or thirty minutes, I awoke to see Joaquin Phoenix breakdancing his way into the arms of Gwyneth Paltrow, and for whatever reason, from that point on I was sort of into it. About an hour later I became totally sucked in, when that moment of dance floor silliness met its dissonant counterpoint with a second, far more desperate scene of Phoenix dancing his way into Paltrow’s arms.  It’ll be too little too late for some, but in its final third, Two Lovers becomes an extremely strong parable about the madness of romantic love, and maybe even its impossibility.

That scene…it looks like a classic romantic high, until you realize that there’s almost no color on the screen beyond the white-gold wisps of Paltrow’s windblown hair dusting the frame. It hits you that the characters think that what they’re doing is going to save them both when in fact (and maybe this is where the generic story arc becomes a bonus), we know it’s only going to make everything worse. It’s bleak. It’s beautiful.

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