Ray Pride

Tired eyes meet anxious eyes, longing matches longing, but impulses are unequal: how many times does that happen on a street corner, in a café, the local tavern?

One of the small things gotten very right in Mark Decena's "Dopamine," a modest but impressive and memorable story of love in the modern world, is how the two protagonists, Rand (John Livingston), a stressed-to-incoherence computer programmer and Sarah (Sabrina Lloyd), an emotionally complex preschool teacher, first catch glimpses of each other in a San Francisco bar.

Part of the gratifying effect comes from the slightly muzzy high-definition video palette the filmmakers have designed, which captures the dim room in deep focus, but also carefully, quietly, diminishes the gleaming quality of the color captured by video. Another is how quietly the song of the bar, the unobtrusive sound of music play in the background, while Rand and his alpha-dog co-programmer dissect the working day without really listening to each other. They've spent over two years at the end of the dot-com boom designing, for pay, a computer program that is designed to involve shy children with a coy but slyly interactive animated bird named, coyly, cutely, precisely, "Koy-Koy."

We have about that much information when Rand and Sarah first meet. We know that Rand believes love is more chemical than emotional, driven by calculations made in our bloodstream against our will by endorphins and dopamine and other chemicals, tricks of the body that soothe our soul when succor is most needed. His father, a disenchanted scientist, pounds Rand with these theories this and again, railing against the Alzheimer's void Rand's mother has tumbled into after fifty years with him.

Livingston is handsome in a thirtysomething-next-door kind of way, short hair chewed back from a high forehead, a quiet smile wanting to tickle out, eyes that hold wells of hurt, compassion, or perhaps only confusion. As Rand, his hands tickle along his pint of beer while Winston makes with his own theories, which mostly involve himself and sex. Other end of the bar, enter Sarah. There are differences in the way HD video captures the human face than on film. While "Dopamine" is being shown on 35mm film, the contours of the bones of a face, the texture of skin, the gleam off one's eyes, have a look that can be discomfitingly harsh, such as the sandpaper-skin close-ups in Wayne Wang's "The Center of the World." But, as Decena shows, with the color correction and other digital tweaking that the format affords filmmakers, it's also possible to capture what is most splendid about the most ordinary of faces.

In a few seconds, Decena will interpolate fantasy imagery of the surge of chemicals through the brain that accompany Rand's first glimpse of Sarah and Sarah's hello-sailor gaze toward Rand, but in the instant their vulnerabilities chime? It's all the eyes. Rand's: liquid, lost. Sarah's: obsidian, eager, wishful. Yes, a portion is due to the actors' craft, some to the storyline--wishy-washy Rand is about to lose this first flicker to his blazing asshole of a buddy Winston, who blatantly cock-blocks Rand from Sarah--but also to the work of a committed crew of filmmakers making their first picture: they know how two people can look at each other, making themselves vulnerable as vulnerable can be in a split-second.

They have needs. They have baggage that can fill a bus terminal. "Dopamine" will fill that out for us. In this moment, however, we know Rand is wounded. We know that Sarah is hungry, going home with rut-happy Winston for the night but, in what one can infer is a painful pattern, finds herself almost immediately dismayed, runs from that ready burst of intimacy into denial.

How will love and Koy-Koy bring them together? In surprising ways. "Dopamine" has been described as the first feature to go all the way through the Sundance Institute's programs, beginning as a 1999 screenwriters' lab project, continuing in successive incarnations as a directors' lab project, debuting at the 2003 festival, and now being distributed under the wing of the Sundance Film Series, the previous entry of which was the more aggressively videocentric immigration saga, "In This World." ("Dopamine" also won a prize for being the festival feature to make the most imaginative use of science.)

So for its Sundance lineage, "Dopamine" has the whiff of perhaps being an earnest little trifle. The title is off-putting. Computer technology is usually death on screen. Video-to-film is still an emerging artistic enterprise. And yet, the quiet, assured dignity that Decena and co-writer Timothy Breitbach offer all their intelligent, talkative characters--even unregenerate ass Winston--is rare and heartening, and even in the emotional thicket of "Dopamine"'s third act, where Rand and Sarah wash away their reservoirs of reserve, where they simply display their mutual loneliness in the most naked of revelations, the movie's intelligence is singular. You want Rand and Sarah to love, but you want Decena and Breitbach and their collaborators to fall in love as well, with another set of characters, an even more intricate narrative that will take less than four years this time to surprise and satisfy the audiences.

"Dopamine" is playing at Pipers Alley.

(2003-10-16)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
Mark Decena's Sundance-developed, San Francisco-set meditation on the nature of attraction is a smart, sexy gem, a love letter to love, San Francisco, and a stranger's eyes across a warm barroom
(2003-10-08)

Thrill kill
"Kill Bill Vol. I" zooms along with the conviction of the true believer, but also suggests the hermetic world view of the truly foolish
(2003-10-08)

An imperfect world
Clint Eastwood's mournful chamber tragedy, "Mystic River," adapted by Brian Helgeland from a novel by Dennis Lehane, is that rare American movie steeped in grief, without resorting to some sort of comic relief
(2003-10-08)

Chicago International Film Festival
Highlights of the film fest's second week
(2003-10-08)

Short Runs
(2003-10-08)

Short Runs
(2003-10-02)

Chicago International Film Festival
(2003-10-02)

Back in Black
(2003-10-02)

World and enough time
(2003-10-02)

Moaning Lisa
(2003-10-02)

Tip of the Week
(2003-10-01)

Tip of the Week
(2003-09-25)

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