Bloodless Coup

A. O. Scott seems very excited, as well, if not quite as eloquent about the film:

But Mr. Kaufman, the wildly inventive screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” has, in his first film as a director, made those efforts look almost conventional. Like his protagonist, a beleaguered theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, he has created a seamless and complicated alternate reality, unsettling nearly every expectation a moviegoer might have about time, psychology and narrative structure.

But though the ideas that drive “Synecdoche, New York” are difficult and sometimes abstruse, the feelings it explores are clear and accessible. These include the anxiety of artistic creation, the fear of love and the dread of its loss, and the desperate sense that your life is rushing by faster than you can make sense of it. A sad story, yes, but fittingly for a movie bristling with paradoxes and conundrums, also extremely funny.

Count me in.

Have you seen any of the outfits Catherine Keener has been wearing to Cannes? Wow.