‘The Falling Star’ Review: A Dark Story in Meticulous Wrapping

“The Falling Star” works best if you watch it with the same eyes through which you’d watch a ballet, albeit a slapsticky one. The story it tells is dark, but the way in which it’s told is lightly comedic, more dependent on images and movement than character and plot. That the film’s directors, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, both got their start (and met each other) as clowns is no surprise. They star here, too: Gordon as Fiona, a bereaved mother who is also a private eye; and Abel as two characters, an activist-turned-bartender, Boris, and his depressed doppelgänger, Dom, who is also Fiona’s ex-husband.

Boris has been hiding out for 35 years since a bombing attempt gone wrong, pouring pints at the Belgian bar he owns with his wife, Kayoko (Kaori Ito). But when a man with a prosthetic arm shows up and tries to assassinate Boris, Kayoko and Boris hatch a plan with their friend and colleague Tim (Philippe Martz) to swap Dom in for Boris, without telling Dom he is a decoy.

If this sounds like a setup for a lightly Shakespearean comedy of errors, that’s because it is, though it’s other things too. There are mistaken identities, missed connections and misguided romances, interspersed with bits of dancing and music not always strictly motivated by the plot.

In their previous films, Abel and Gordon have worked in the tradition of cinematic burlesque, and here they riff on film noir (though our private eye is a lady, and she is asked to hunt down a lost dog). The noir provides some background tone: a world of anxiety and suspicion, a bit pessimistic and also swoony.

Mostly, though, “The Falling Star” is a comedy with an edge: a story about losing one’s sense of purpose in life and wondering if it will ever return. Yet the film does not lead with its plot, nor are its characters all that memorable. What will stay with you is the mood, and that mood is created by its images.

The camera is often set at an angle to evoke the distance between characters, and thus “The Fallen Star” feels almost like a series of tableaus, scenes painted in rich hues of deep green and bright red and warm gold, dressed sparingly but strikingly. Each frame recalls the fussy, otherworldly precision of Jacques Tati or Wes Anderson; in one scene, two characters unwittingly sit next to one another in bathroom stalls, crying on the same sheet of toilet paper that spools under the wall between them, an image that is clever, a little funny and also terribly sad.