E-Mail This Article to a Friend Light entertainment Plus, Moore is less BY GERALD PEARY

It’s been four decades since Michelangelo Antonioni sent Monica Vitti walking aimlessly, unhappily, through the icy environment that constitutes the modern city. In L’avventura (1960), La notte (1961) L’eclisse (1962), and Il deserto rosso (1964), Vitti showed how empty relationships and, more subtly, a sleek, alien architecture could paralyze even upper-middle-class women.

Has the situation improved any since then? Not in the arthouse-film world. Although telling a familiarly grim cinema story, Gina Kim’s Invisible Light, which screens this Sunday, November 7, at the Harvard Film Archive, offers a particularly vivid dramatization of this ennui and estrangement. The focus is on two women, each of whom suffers for half the 78-minute film before Kim’s unflinching, obsessively probing 35mm camera.

Set mostly in a rental apartment in a motel-like building in California, part one sticks close to twentysomething Gah-in (Yoon Sun Choi) as she nibbles on low-low-fat food, keeps checking her weight on a scale (shedding her running pants so she’ll register less), and avoids answering the telephone, which she’s unplugged. Although there’s almost no dialogue beyond "Yes" and "Thank you," there is a telephone message played by Gah-in, and it’s a disturbing one. A desperate woman pleads with her for conversation, saying, "I’ve known about you for a long time, but I don’t hate you personally. Please pick up the phone." We surmise, I think, that the woman on the phone is someone’s wife and that Gah-in is her husband’s mistress. I say "surmise" because Gah-in says nothing in reply to the call. But her frenetic actions say plenty: she keeps prowling her apartment munching on victuals. Kim holds the camera for one excruciating long take in which Gah-in sits before an open refrigerator and gobbles random items from every shelf. Cut to Gah-in gagging and heaving over a toilet. The apartment has the impersonal, half-lived-in look of a place that a well-heeled foreign student has chosen for its proximity to school. Is that Gah-in’s status? We know nothing except that she’s a Korean residing in California and is pining for the snows of her native country.

Cut to part two: we hear the "I’ve known about you for a long time" phone call repeated from the other end. Do-hee (Sun-jin Lee) is calling California from Seoul. Calling her husband’s mistress. More ennui, more unhappiness. Do-hee, we gradually learn, has flown back to Korea from the USA, skipping out on her husband. He’s unfaithful; she’s pregnant. Should she have the baby? Should she abort it? She’s the mirror image of Gah-in, residing here in a loser motel, troubled by eating, vomiting in the street. And there’s an equivalent scene to Gah-in’s bulimic refrigerator eat-in, a long take in which Do-hee masturbates in her bed and, after an unsatisfying orgasm, cries her eyes out.

Is there hope? At one point, Do-hee eats an apple, and in the last cryptic scene, she shines a flashlight at her pregnant belly and sings what might be a Korean lullaby. For the baby? Gina Kim, who is teaching this year at Harvard, will be at the screening Sunday. Please ask her.

HAVE OTHERS NOTICED how Bush-like is our Michael Moore? I’m talking about a smug, demagogic millionaire with a carefully honed baseball-cap regular-Joe persona, with a propensity for name calling and fact shuffling, and with a megalomaniac tendency to anoint himself as America’s No. 1 Patriot. I’ve seen Moore up close at press conferences squirming out of well-argued accusations that some of his documentary conclusions are hasty or even completely erroneous. George W. isn’t the only one who never ever admits he’s wrong.

Although it was made by Republicans, I’m still hoping for a Boston showing of Michael Moore Hates America, which premiered recently at LA’s Liberty Film Festival. According to the Variety review, Michael Wilson’s film uses Moore-like kamikaze tactics to discredit the Fahrenheit 9/11 filmmaker, even stalking him to force an on-camera interview à la Roger & Me. Guess what? Moore refuses! Among those who do appear on camera: a psychologist who theorizes that Moore suffers from a "narcissistic personality disorder" and documentarian legend Albert Maysles, who complains that Moore is "tyrannized by his own method, which is to simplify complex ideas."