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Movie and stage actor Paul Giamatti's soul is a small, nigh inconsequential thing. Paul--played by movie and stage actor Paul Giamatti--knows this because he's gone to the Soul Storage Company, a Roosevelt Island-based clinic run by Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) that helps its clients deal with the metaphysical weight of day-to-day existence by extracting their souls and putting them in cold storage. Paul seeks out its services--he read about it in the New Yorker--because he's having a hard time preparing the lead role in a production of Anton Chekov's Uncle Vanya. And after Paul lies back on the large soul extractor and has his soul removed and placed inside a glass cylinder, he sees the source of his performance anxiety, intellectual vertigo, and emotional angst: a little, prosaic chick pea.

At least that's what it looks like in writer/director Sophie Barthes' debut feature, Cold Souls, a philosophical meditation hiding behind a science-fiction premise and all wrapped up in a intelligently nutty comedy of manners. Barthes maintains a light but confident touch throughout. Her tone is erudite but she's not afraid of a good visual pun, verbal double entendre, or old-fashioned ribbing (of course you'd have to go to Roosevelt Island to have your soul removed). Her muted visual ideas quietly reinforce her themes (antiseptically outfitting the clinic in sterile whites and chrome, isolating Giamatti in long shots that make him look adrift). And her script bubbles with brainy verve and outright absurdity: The movie begins with a Renee Descartes' quote ("The soul has its principal seat in the small gland located in the middle of the brain") that the movie appears to take as bald fact, and Dr. Flintstein informs Paul that he can have his soul stored in New Jersey if he wants to avoid sales tax.

These familiar banalities nicely link Cold Souls to the attitude Barthes is aiming for here: the matter-of-fact satire of Luis Buñuel and 1970s Woody Allen. Paul himself is a rather Allen-like persona. Pragmatically neurotic--he tells Dr. Flintstein that he's less interested in being happy than in not sucking onstage--Paul enjoys a rather comfortable life with his lovely wife (Emily Watson), a well-apportioned apartment, and a leading Chekov role. But he's finicky, feeling a little bit off, and he's not quite properly getting into Vanya--a play concerned with what people make of their lives. Perhaps if he had his soul extracted, he might be able to proceed unburdened.

By what? Barthes wisely doesn't define the soul in Cold, instead visualizing it as an object and letting you project meaning onto it: Is the soul what defines a person, what animates the corporeal body, what makes you you? Paul isn't that concerned at first, for not only can Dr. Flintstein remove and store your soul, but you can try a different soul on for a brief time; Russians operate a black-market soul underground. And Paul opts for a Russian poet's soul to power his Vanya.

Barthes parallels Paul's ennui with soul mule Nina (Dina Korzun), who borrows Paul's soul and ferries it back to St. Petersburg for her boss' girlfriend (Katheryn Winnick), who presumes an American actor's soul will improve her soap-opera acting (she'd like Al Pacino's). By the time Paul and Nina cross paths and they travel to Russia to recover his soul, Souls has seeped into a more conventional story, but it isn't a narrative cop-out. Souls migrates from considering Paul's indeterminate malaise to how he is affecting other people--his wife, his Vanya co-stars, Nina--that suggests questions about the ineffability of self, and the perhaps imperceptible gap between self-knowledge and self-hatred, rather than settling for answers that may feel infelicitous and childless.

The movie's an inchoate journey that relies entirely on Giamatti's performance. It's never quite clear what exactly troubles him, and Barthes cagily lets the actor actualize his existential affliction in three different Vanya rehearsal scenes. The first opens the movie, and Giamatti recites a key monologue, where Vanya muses, "If I could just live what is left in a different way." It outlines the movie's serpentine path as much as its cloudy theme, and the performance appears solid, strong, and serious with touches of whimsy. It certainly doesn't feel off.

Giamatti next tackles Vanya after he's had his soul removed, and this Vanya is a bundle of unnecessary and misdirected energy, prone to awkwardly timed gestures, unrestrained eye movements, and borderline inappropriate onstage personal contact, as if Paul minus his soul suddenly became a portly, hirsute Matthew Lillard. It's funny and you're not sure it's supposed to be.

The next time Paul appears as Vanya, he's in the internal company of the Russian poet, and the difference is revelatory. Giamatti wears Vanya's haggard hope like a favorite cardigan, his eyes wet from staring into his future's unforeseeable chasm, his voice swimming through Chekov's lines like a haggard man through velvet. The implication is that a soul fuels this severe empathy, but the suggestion only makes that idea of the soul ineffably unknowable and unquestionably necessary.

E-mail Bret McCabe