"Reconstruction" has been compared to both "Memento" and "Mulholland Drive," and Boe has been touted as the heir to his countryman Lars von Trier, but by far the most impressive thing about the film is not its list of influences but the fact that it feels like something you've never seen before. Boe lacks the maniacal puzzle-brain of Christopher Nolan or the paranoid density of David Lynch, but "Reconstruction" has a poetic sensibility, as well as an old-fashioned Continental appetite for romance, that makes it distinctive. Its dazzling camerawork and disorienting use of effects are completely contemporary, but in mood and tone it suggests the early bittersweet romantic comedies of Ingmar Bergman, or Wong Kar-wai's retro masterpiece "In the Mood for Love."

Boe isn't trying to lead you down the rabbit hole into psychiatric distress, or blow your mind with the sheer lysergic power of his images. But "Reconstruction" is in its own quiet and lovely way a real mystery. Is it just a Twilight Zone-style story about a man who becomes a fictional character? Is it about the fictions we all create in our heads around the attractive strangers we see on the street? Is it a narrative lesson in the ambiguities of quantum physics, or an Orpheus-and-Eurydice tale about the male tendency to abandon the woman you have for the one you can't have? Maybe when I see it again -- and I can't wait -- I'll figure that out.

Dreams, ambiguity and "Incident at Loch Ness": A conversation with Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog doesn't want me to give too much away about his new movie, "Incident at Loch Ness." It's more fun for audiences, he says, if you go into it not really knowing what to expect. "Tell them they have to figure out what is real and what is not for themselves," he says on the phone from Los Angeles. There's no danger of my screwing that up, since: A) the New York Times already blew the whistle on the whole "Loch Ness" enterprise, and B) I'm not too sure what's going on in the film myself.

Here's what we know so far: Herzog, the legendary German director of "Aguirre: The Wrath of God" and "Fitzcarraldo," went to Scotland with Hollywood screenwriter Zak Penn ("Last Action Hero" and "X2") to make a movie at Loch Ness. What they came back with was a film (actually directed by Penn, not Herzog, no matter what various Internet geeks may claim) that purports to document Herzog's quest to make a documentary about the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster. That's right, a documentary -- or at least an apparent documentary -- about the making of a documentary.

As to how "real" Penn's documentary is, well, let's just say that by the time you get to former Playboy centerfold Kitana Baker, who is supposedly working on Herzog's film as a sound technician in an infinitesimal bikini, you may have your doubts. "Incident at Loch Ness," I feel safe in saying, is something of a gigantic goof, perpetrated by Penn and Herzog -- and the goofees included much of the entertainment media, people in the film business, the Scottish authorities and (I think) even some of the film's cast.

Variety, the Hollywood Reporter and various daily newspapers ran stories reporting on Herzog's Loch Ness project, and it certainly appears from what you see on the screen that cinematographer Gabriel Beristain and sound man David Davidson also believed they were going to Scotland to make a film with the legendary eccentric. The vertiginous humor of the film -- and it's pretty funny, at least for the first 40 minutes or so -- comes from never being sure who's in on the joke and who isn't, and whether some of what you're seeing might just be genuine.

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