The Iris Effect

Have you ever seen a movie set in a foreign country and felt the impulse to book a flight there immediately? The Iris Effect had this effect on me. The images in this film, of Saint Petersburg, are spell-binding, to say the least. I felt immediately drawn to the mysterious, shadowy, plaintive tones that Irek Hartowicz's masterful photography captures of SP. Unfortunately, the film is otherwise an embarrassment. The script is uninspired, the acting, especially Anne Archer's performance, a sheer anguish, and the denouement absurd. I feel certain that Lebedev was thinking of Don't Look Now when he made this film, and he manages to create a similar atmosphere in The Iris Effect by thwarting at every turn the mother's attempts to uncover the truth regarding the fate of her son. But you can't make a film about a supposedly accomplished artist who has been missing for ten years and whose disappearance, following a fight with his mother, is linked to his quest for self-discovery and artistic glory, if the art he made is of the quality you might find, at best, at Pier One. The director also fails to develop the obvious iris/ iris metaphor--for some silly reason, I kept waiting for the director to do something with this, even though I knew, a minute into the film, that we were already scraping cinematic rock- bottom and that I could probably swim the length of the Gulf of Finland before anything momentous happened.