Wow, this film was a mess- a self-indulgent, irredeemable mess. I enjoyed the first half, but then it began to slowly segue into the unwatchable. I happen to be a fan of surrealism, but there was nothing remotely rewarding to be found within the fragmented, disjointed imagery. It actually made me start to view ‘art’, at least within the context of this film, as something ugly, soul-destroying, even unnervingly vile. The message I gathered from this is that life is depressing and interminably long, and then you die.
I also had a real problem with the role of women in this film. They seem to either exist as irrational/detached/flake-y art ‘muses,’ (again portraying art as divisive and harmful, not conjoining, redemptive or liberating, as I and a great deal of the world see it) or as vacuous bit parts who seem devoid of passion except when regularly offering Hoffman’s character comfort through sex.
The only brief moment of the film I enjoyed was the “priest” in the rain/collective cast photo scene (I don’t know how else to describe it) and his diatribe on the sadness of the human experience in our lifelong efforts to find love and relativity to others. It was a bit high school diary, but it rang irrefutably true and touched me immensely. But that scene was short lived, immediately followed by a random, completely unrelated moment of what I can only describe as an obligatory exercise in the license of creative lunacy. I cannot even recall offhand what was even involved in that particular scene, but that’s precisely my point. It’s pretty much how this film operates. One moment of mild, life-affirming poignancy is then “cut” into by something completely irrelevant and, frankly, nihilistic. It makes for a very unsettling experience, as there is nothing rewarding about the sequence, subsequently. The poignancy is overtaken by the nihilism and effectively cancels it out.

And then, it all ends with a dull, deathly, silencing “beep.”

To paraphrase the great John Lydon, ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?