STEVEN SNYDER'S REVIEW

"Coffee and Cigarettes" is an enjoyable distraction of a film. It is not substantive or meaningful, nor does it try to be, but is instead a work that relishes the flow of conversations, the dynamics of human interaction and, as the title suggests, the very simplicity of a cup of coffee and a lit cigarette.

  The film is really a series of loosely-connected shorts, some of which have won awards at prominent film festivals. Collectively they run the gambit from neurotic, such as the conversation between dry comic Steven Wright and the ADD-afflicted Roberto Benigni. Others are more subtly engaging and intriguing, such as Cate Blanchett’s dual performance in a conversation between an elitist actress and her lower-class cousin, or in the conversation between long-lost relatives Alfred Molina and Steve Coogan, where the shallowness of Hollywood's name-dropping culture is used to comic effect.

  But the remainder of "Cigarettes," while even bemusing, feels stilted and awkward. The characters on the screen feel like, well, characters on the screen, and in some instances it feels as if we are watching a belabored episode of "Seinfeld:" a conversation about nothing that relishes in the fact that it is about nothing.

  Fans of the film will no doubt advocate this very fact - that much like "My Dinner With Andre," "Cigarettes" turns its back on traditional narrative and, in the process, discovers the spontaneity of life. While I see this evident in those conversations listed above, in the others I think the spontaneity gets muted by the forced nature of the conversation topics, the mannerisms of the participants and the disorienting effect of a film that only allows conversations to last a few minutes before cutting to black and then switching characters and locales.

I enjoyed this film, but in a more superficial way. It is a daydream that evaporates at its end - a nice cup of coffee that goes down smooth but is hardly remembered.

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