Mister Lonely

Harmony Korine's film runs two stories side by side and never joins them. In one, a Michael Jackson impersonator played by Diego Luna meets a Marilyn Monroe impersonator played by Samantha Morton in Paris and goes with her to a commune of impersonators in the Scottish Highlands, where Charlie Chaplin, the Pope, the Queen, Madonna and the Three Stooges live together and prepare a show. In the other, missionary nuns in Panama discover they can jump from a plane without parachutes and survive; Werner Herzog plays their priest. The idea is how much weight an arrangement built by people who have stopped being themselves can bear. The commune starts out as a paradise and dissolves precisely because of what imitation is: on that stage there is no real audience for anyone. Denis Lavant, James Fox, Anita Pallenberg and Leos Carax are also in it. The film screened at Cannes in 2007 and was released in 2008. Who it is for: viewers who like Korine's scattered, lyrical, strange cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a connected narrative or the two stories to meet, which they never do.