Cold Souls and Paper Hearts

What is the shape and size of a human soul? Does it look like a chickpea? A gumdrop? A pet rock? And if you could somehow extract your soul from your body, what would be left? Would you still be you? These are among the concerns taken up by writer-director Sophie Barthes' Cold Souls, an amusing divertissement that has injected some welcome levity into a Sundance dramatic competition dominated by visions of poverty, incest, domestic violence, dead children, bloody border crossings and the shadow of 9/11.

Barthes' film, which could alternately be called Being Paul Giamatti, features the hangdog American Splendor star as himself, in a gently existential comedy about the little-known but highly lucrative world of international soul trafficking. During the rehearsals for a stage production of Uncle Vanya, Giamatti begins to feel weighed down by Chekhov's lovelorn, chronically dissatisfied protagonist, finding himself unable to slip out of character when he goes home at night. At the suggestion of his agent, the actor puts his soul on deposit at a Roosevelt Island "soul storage facility" run by a kooky David Strathairn (not playing himself), then later opts for a soul transplant courtesy of a black market of Russian-harvested souls ferried to the U.S. in the bellies of human mules (one of whom is played by the excellent Russian actress Dina Korzun, last seen at Sundance as the wife of Rip Torn in Forty Shades of Blue).

Maria Vasilyevna Voinitskaya Full of Grace? Not exactly. Like a lot of Sundance entries past and present, Cold Souls begins with a blast of self-assured ingenuity that it doesn't quite sustain over the course of the entire feature. (I for one longed to see more of the havoc all Giamatti's soul-swapping wreaks on his marriage to an underused Emily Watson.) But Barthes' low-fi futurism, generous good humor and respect for the audience's literacy are easy to admire, and make Cold Souls vastly preferable to this year's other competition film about people searching for the answers to life's big questions.

In writer-director John Hindman's Arlen Faber, Jeff Daniels plays to the back row as a reclusive Philadelphia author who 20 years ago published a book, Me and God, that came to define spirituality for an entire generation. Now, as reclusive authors are wont to do in Sundance movies, Faber is slowly lured out of his shell by an aggressively annoying cast of supporting characters that includes an overbearing, overcaffeinated single mother (Lauren Graham) and a self-pitying alcoholic bookseller (Lou Taylor Pucci). "Hell is other people," Faber says at one point, quoting Sartre; but unlike the self-absorbed, misanthropic writer Daniels so effortlessly brought to life in The Squid and the Whale, this one never convinces as anything but the destined-to-be-lovable central figure in a wide-screen sit-com.

An existential quandary of a different sort drives director Nicholas Jasenovec's Paper Heart, a hydra-headed narrative/non-fiction hybrid in which the diminutive Asian-American comedienne Charlyne Yi (Knocked Up) sets out on a cross-country journey to discover whether true love is a reality or merely an illusion. For a while, as Yi decamps in Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma, where she poses her disarming questions to an assortment of ministers, psychics, biology professors and barroom gurus, Paper Heart is a delight, as are the construction-paper-and-fishing-wire animated interludes Yi uses to dramatize key events from the lives of the several longtime married couples she interviews along her way. Of considerably less interest is the contrived "B" storyline (which eventually becomes the "A" storyline) in which Yi's own budding romance with Superbad and Juno star Michael Cera (who appears as himself) wreaks havoc with her progress on the documentary. But in Sundance -- as in most relationships -- a 60/40 success/failure ratio is nothing to scoff at.