John Malkovich opens and closes his directorial debut, an adaptation of Nicholas Shakespeare’s novel The Dancer Upstairs, with the late Nina Simone performing " Who Knows Where the Time Goes. " Maybe that’s not a tactically sound decision for a two-hour film that moves at an adagio pace. But from the beginning Malkovich wants us to think, to ask questions, just as the motley, polyglot bunch in the car listening to the Simone tape in the film’s first scene do ( " Why does she keep talking? " ). He wants us to be a remove from what’s going on, not unlike visitors to his portal in Being John Malkovich, or like his film’s protagonist, Rejas (Javier Bardem), the detective assigned to track down the murderous, enigmatic terrorist Ezequiel (Abel Folk).

The Dancer Upstairs is based on the real-life pursuit of Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Peruvian Marxist revolutionary group Sendero Luminoso ( " The Shining Path " ), a lethal bunch whose bizarre, brutal campaign came to an end with Guzmán’s capture in 1992 in a room above a Lima dance studio. But in the film, as in the novel, the Shining Path might as well be the Yellow Brick Road for all the political specificity involved. Set somewhere in South America in the recent past, according to a title card, Dancer tries hard to locate itself in the metaphysical or mythological Neverland of authors like Borges or Cortázar.

That setting finds its most evocative representation in Bardem’s face, a taurine mask that perpetually sighs ennui and weltschmerz; as soon as his doleful kisser makes an appearance, it fills the entire screen with melancholy. Rejas has reason to be discontented. He quit his high-paying job as a lawyer and became a cop because he wanted to do good; now it seems the best he can do is maintain a corrupt status quo, squelching violent rebellion against the country’s repressive regime in order to keep the army off the streets. A military government, he knows, would be real bad. Meanwhile, his trophy wife needs to be kept in make-up and fancy clothes.

This tentative compromise begins to crumble when Ezequiel and his minions launch their first cryptic strikes. Dead dogs hang from lamp posts with sticks of dynamite in their jaws. A waiflike little boy blows up a government official, and himself. A general stops his limo to chat up some adolescent cuties in school uniforms. They pull out a surprise from under their little skirts. Animals and children — it seems a revolution more with W.C. Fields than with Marx or Kant in mind.

Maybe that’s why Rejas’s boss, Calderón (Luis Miguel Citra), who’s even more cynical and defeated, assigns him to the case; perhaps, he thinks, the officer’s detached, absurdist sensibility might match the surreality of the attacks. Or maybe it’s Rejas’s rural background: he comes from one of the oppressed backwaters, where Ezequiel seems to have the most support. No doubt the wily Calderón also recognizes that for these same reasons Rejas might have some sympathy with the terrorist’s cause and pursue him all the more tenaciously as his alter ego. In the meantime, however, the government still refuses to cough up his and the rest of the department’s back pay, and when Rejas goes to his daughter’s ballet teacher to apologize for a bounced check, he meets Yolanda (Laura Morante), the love of his life.

The rest of the story is more moody and meandering than gripping, just as in the original novel (Malkovich wisely forgoes Shakespeare’s pseudo-Conradian frame tale). Neither does the assortment of accents (the dialogue is mostly in English, with some in an Indian dialect) add to the clarity; the Italian Morante is easy to follow, but whenever the Spanish Bardem delivers his melodiously rhythmic, infinitely sad lines, you look down for nonexistent subtitles.

Dancer, though, is not about a story or a political situation but about sublime gestures and hopeless and illusory passion. It makes an interesting counterpart to another American actor’s recent effort, Robert Duvall’s Assassination Tango, which likewise involves political violence and romance and Latin dance. Bardem’s detective never does cut a rug (Ezequiel, however, does), and viewers won’t be tapping their toes as much as they will be scratching their heads, but Dancer’s point seems to be that in the face of inevitable terror, the best we can hope for is art and love.