Ana Marie Cox

Hepburn’s appeal was based in Old World elegance and New World daring. Her style, at the center of films from “Roman Holiday” to “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” to “My Fair Lady,” was modern but classic, reserved yet alluring. After a short career as a model and dancer, she found an audience in the 1950s and ’60s as an alternative to the sexpot sirens who dominated the previous era. She may have been Dutch-English, but she represented something Americans aspire to: class.

Hewitt represents what Americans all too often really are: craven, opportunistic exhibitionists. Most Americans lack her rack, but many of us — one way or another — desire it. This may explain Hewitt’s astonishing popularity. Aside from her stint on “Party of Five” and the new (but doomed) “Time of Your Life,” Hewitt is the face that sold a thousand ad pages by appearing on the cover of the first Teen People, the magazine that’s become one of the most successful launches of the decade.

And yet few other stars also arouse such antipathy, even among the generation of teenyboppers whose sole mission is to eradicate all traces of the early ’90s (indie rock, riot grrrls, the fetishization of authenticity as a virtue). Hewitt is even hated by the fans of bounce-alikes such as Sarah Michelle Gellar; she’s mocked by the same teens she tries to be a role model for. She’s said that she won’t do nude scenes or use drugs in movies because she doesn’t want to do anything on screen that teens shouldn’t do themselves. Clearly, that doesn’t include being chased by an ax murderer in a wet T-shirt. I hate Jennifer Love Hewitt, too, although it’s hard to articulate a good reason why.

“The Audrey Hepburn Story” helps, though. As a biopic, it’s just this side of parody. Or just that side. Most of the story is told in clumsily edited flashback (sometimes flashing back from within a flashback) from a “present time” scene that appears to take all of half an hour.

Hepburn’s own story is treated just as shabbily. The movie ends midcareer, leaving out her divorce from actor Mel Ferrer and some of her most important and demanding films (“The Children’s Hour,” “Wait Until Dark”), but also her work for UNICEF as a special ambassador to the United Nations. Maybe the filmmakers saw this as trivia, but even the events within the film’s brief take on Hepburn’s life are made trivial.

Hepburn’s time in a refugee camp, for instance, is glossed over briefly, recklessly, even offensively. And earlier, living in Arnhem, Netherlands, on the eve of the Nazi occupation, Hewitt-as-Hepburn complains to her mother like a teen denied access to the family car: “But you said Germany would never invade Holland!” More important than these formative events apparently — the entire movie itself hinges upon it — is whether Hepburn can make Truman Capote smile.

There are many such opportunities to fustigate over the liberties taken with Hepburn’s biography, but it is even more entertaining to see what they’ve done with her clothes. The famously fashionable Heburn is transformed into Christina Aguilera at the prom. Hemlines hike. Necklines plunge. As a performer who could act, sing and dance, Hepburn was what was known as a triple threat. When the busty Hewitt gathers up her most significant assets, however, she displays something more on the order of a double threat: left and right.

It may be a vague awareness of this discrepancy that propels the movie’s most revealing subplot: the dancer Hepburn’s struggle to learn how to act. Repeatedly, Hewitt-as-Hepburn demurs, “I’m not an actress” and “I can’t act.” The movie’s most painful sequence is a five-minute interlude wherein Hepburn — magically — learns how. Would that Hewitt were capable of a similar feat.

There’s no need for a 50-minute hour to see the depths of projection Hewitt has brought to the role. Most telling is the depiction of Hepburn’s Academy Award win. No doubt Hewitt felt the Oscar acceptance was an important scene. No doubt it is the only time Hewitt will ever lay her hands on one. What may be most appalling about “The Audrey Hepburn Story,” though, isn’t its inaccuracies or even Hewitt’s complete failure to capture Hepburn.

What’s striking is the audacity she shows in even trying, and the travesty she makes while doing so. Entertainment is entertainment and for the most part I’m content to let bad television, bad music and bad movies lapse into the category of trivia answers and episodes of “Behind the Music,” not quite forgotten, but mostly beside the point.

But “The Audrey Hepburn Story” galls because it’s a model for what pop culture has become: the devouring of the past in order to make excrement for the future. Seen this way, Hewitt’s inappropriateness as Hepburn almost makes sense; as Hewitt never intended to become Hepburn, she remade Hepburn to be more like her. This explains the biopic’s portrayal of Hepburn as man-hungry (falling in love on every set) and petulant, an oddly adolescent pose for someone who in real life was robbed of those years.

Hewitt hasn’t just made a bad movie, she’s badly rewritten a life.

Two years ago, Hewitt received a “Blockbuster Entertainment Award,” one of those sub-Golden Globes trinkets that serve mainly to rationalize the bad taste of the public. But to judge by the relative success Hewitt met with on “Party of Five” (or, as it was known around my house, “Fiesta Del Cinco”), her most significant strength as an actress is her ability to cry on cue.

And Hewitt’s eyes carry her through other parts as well. In all of her roles, her expression of emotion is limited to above the nose: She opens her eyes; she opens them wider; she closes them. In especially tense scenes, she gazes sidewise. No matter what the script, it appears as though she’s being directed by an optometrist.

Yet there she is. Both Teen People and People dote on her, serving up dozens of pieces in the past two years. Millions of people sat through her star turn in “I Know What You Did Last Summer” twice. Most substantially, she convinced someone she could carry “The Audrey Hepburn Story.” Are people that dumb?

With Hewitt’s fans, of course, that’s an open question. Her fan club offers a “museum quality” “rare lithograph” of Hewitt “arriving at a movie premiere.” She’s contributed to both volumes of “Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul.” The so-called plot of the sequel “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” turns on the assumption that neither Hewitt’s college freshman character nor the audience would know the capital of Brazil.

Meanwhile, a much stronger message is getting through to many other devout Hewitt-watchers. She is, it seems, a lightening rod for pure, untrammeled adolescent hate.

There’s a spate of spite sites devoted to desiccating Hewitt on the Web, generally constructed by the same age cohort — if not the same gender mix — that adores her. Though the Maxim crowd has paid attention to Hewitt’s, er, career, her fixation on being a role model has brought her a fair amount of female fans as well. Non-fans are overwhelmingly teen girls, and their sites (there are seven in the “Anti-Love Ring”) are enthusiastic, drenched in the same exaggerated prose and enthusiastic phrase-making that covers fan sites. But while the fans call her “Love,” she’s known in these parts as “Screwitt.”

Hewitt is mocked for a variety of reasons, but a few consistent themes emerge: She is overly cheerful (“Happy-happy all the time”). She is rumored to have dated many demographically appropriate men, from the lead singer of scatter-shot non-sequiturists LFO to the inexplicably inescapable Carson Daly (“Slut”). Most frequently, they complain that she’s too, well, attached to her breasts. This is a charge that Hewitt’s public statements — and attire — do little to diminish. When she called her best-known film “I Know What Your Breasts Did Last Summer” in an interview, it seemed like clever self-awareness. When she told Maxim that she developed “early,” and that “my mom raised me to … appreciate it because it’s sort of what makes me me and all that” and that “as a joke” she named them “Thelma and Louise,” it just seemed like delusional self-aggrandizement.

Diehard Hewitt-haters will eagerly note the bankrupt symbolism of downgrading celebrated female characters to pet names for her knockers. Considering how the ascendancy of Bridget and Britney to the tops of their respective charts has gone a long way to demolishing whatever remaining base of support feminism might claim among America’s young people, a surprising number of sites let Hewitt have it for reinforcing female stereotypes. As one non-fan hyperbolically puts it: “Throughout history women have fought to earn respect and to escape the idea that we’re mere objects for men to ogle. JHL is setting us back centuries by stressing that it’s not about how much talent or intelligence a woman has, it’s the way you look which gives you worth.”

But for all their Faludian rhetoric, the attention these sites pay to Hewitt’s looks — indeed, to Hewitt at all — undermines their proto-feminist arguments. Indeed, addressing Hewitt in particular lets the rest of Hollywood off without even a warning.

That’s not the counter-argument presented by Hewitt’s fans. (Endearingly, the anti-Hewitt sites often proudly display — and invite — the flame mail sent by Hewitt’s admirers.) But the method by which the critics counter the fans’ most frequent salvo — “jealousy” — is revealing: If I am jealous, writes one commentator, “then how come I LOVE all the actresses who have talent and are actually beautiful?”

Certainly, nothing quite betrays adolescent fickleness like the suggestions some sites make for role models that are more appropriate. One site, after critiquing Hewitt, goes on to suggest animatronic toothpick Calista Flockhart as a replacement in the Hepburn role. As far as feminist role models/replacements go, this is a little like exchanging Mary-Kate for Ashley.

These sites take on a distinctly “why her” tone, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) asking “why not me?” Take this aspiring actress and “former” Hewitt fan’s mid-rant concession: “Please don’t call Love’s clothes slutty and this is why: I have some of the articles of clothes that Jennifer sometimes wears and they are not slutty.” In this way, the anti-Hewitt sites are not very different from the fan sites — those maintained by girls, at least — whose central impetus is not to question “why her,” but to simply be her.

Of course, the indictment of Hewitt could be extended to any 20-something starlet. What’s odd is that such an affectless and blank performer as Hewitt could be the one to summon any sort of strong emotion. In the end, however, Hewitt is objectionable not because of an
especially distinctive absence of talent but rather her very ordinariness as a teen role model. In a way, hating Hewitt is easy exactly because she is so undistinguished. She’s famous without the veneer of professionalism that’s won by appearing in films that are seen by people over 25. She’s the kind of celebrity who presents at the Nickelodeon Kid’s Choice Award, and who shows up to “Hollywood Bowls” (you know, at a bowling alley) charity events. She still lives with her mom.

For her detractors and her fans, Hewitt is just the other side of normal. What makes someone choose to hate her and not adore her is in the end as mysterious as a crush, and just as normal. In the frenzy of a youth media culture that celebrates fandom like never before (MTV’s “FANatic,” InStyle magazine, four book-length “biographies” of Freddie Prinze Jr.), we forget that a well-nourished grudge is as important a part of growing up as a first kiss or a best friend. It’s probably just as important later. A crush helps you define who you are, a grudge helps you define who you aren’t.

And hate, like love, needs an object. Hating Hewitt is the flip side of Tiger Beat, and those who indulge in it are granted a peak through a crack in the mirror glass of celebrity. It’s also good practice for down the line, when you discover people and symbols who truly deserve to be taken down, to be driven away by raw disgust — David Duke, Dr. Laura, whoever invented call waiting. Love makes the world go ’round, but a healthy hatred can keep it from spinning the wrong direction. As one anti-Hewitt essay put it: “Hate is not a bad thing. It is a bad feeling, but is more of a great power.”

11:25 a.m.: More journalists arrive. The six people standing in line are so picked over I am embarrassed to ask any questions.

11:27 a.m: The Monica bags are actually pretty cute. Square, shaped like the cloth bags the Strand gives out, but made of thick, expensive fabric. Brocades. A kicky lime green and black zebra stripe. Very now. Very Spring 2000. Would go well with Capri pants and a sleeveless blouse.

11:30 a.m.: I glance over the balcony and notice that more reporters have arrived; I mention this to the people in line (all women, none wearing black), estimating that the press-to-line ratio is now more like 10-to-3. Several of them run to the railing to see for themselves. They seem to be just as excited about the press as about Monica. I’m sure Henri Bendel feels the same way.

11:32 a.m.: By now, my scribbling is noticed and Jill — visiting New York from New Mexico — asks me who I’m working for. She tells me that
she’s been here since 9 a.m. and that she’s already
seen her twice this morning. “We know more than the reporters,” she grins. I smile back wanly. I ask her how she got to be here, and she says that they heard about it while watching TV in their hotel room.

But why would you come? “Well,” she says, “We’re from Clovis, New Mexico,” as if this would explain it. Then she continues, “I don’t really know why we’re here. We think she’s neat. She went through a really terrible thing and turned it into something good.” I ask Jill if she “identifies” with Monica, and she is slow to reply. “Well,” she starts, “I’m not sure how to answer that.” It’s OK, I tell her. She holds up her black-and-white Bendel’s bag. “I already got one.” She laughs. “I spent $192 on a bag,” she says not quite believing it. “I just thought I’d tell you that.”

11:40 a.m.: I overhear the woman from People confirming an exclusive. I feel a vague pang of jealously initially, but then I think, “What is
there left to ask?”

11:42 a.m.: Do an actual head count of the press. Thirty-six people — maybe more, since I only counted people holding TV cameras or notebooks. One more person has gotten in line. Still all women; one is wearing a fluffy sweater embroidered with hearts. I find out that she’s visiting from North Carolina. Another reporter asks me if anyone in the line is from New York.

11:43 a.m.: A male person gets in line! I pounce.

He’s originally from Virginia, but he lives here now. He’s an aspiring actor, been here seven months. His name is Dallas. I tell him that with a name like that it’s only a matter of time before he’s a soap opera star. “I know,” he replies.

He’s getting a bag for his mother for Mother’s Day. Is his mom a Monica fan? “No, she just saw them on the Internet and thought they were cute.” Is he a Monica fan? “I like her,” he says, “She was on the cover of Jane and I just think it’s really cool the way she’s handled it.” “It.” So vague. During the time I’m here, only one person I talk to mentions exactly why she’s famous, and then only to scold
her. Others talk about “it,” or “the scandal.”

Dallas asks me where I’m from. I tell him, he nods but shows no recognition. Then he brightens. “I can’t believe ‘Access Hollywood’ is here!”

11:50 a.m.: Four more people get in line. As I finish scribbling the last of Dallas’ words, another reporter slides up and whispers, “Are you done with him?” “He’s all yours.” I feel like we are women waiting in line for bathrooms at the Super Bowl. The normal rules of etiquette are suspended in cases of extreme demand.

11:55 a.m.: A dozen photographers are ushered into a roped-off press box about 3 feet by 9 feet. It is about 4 feet from where Monica will be playing salesgirl (showing individual customers their choices before they are shepherded off to the register). I sneak in behind them just in time to hear snippets of a statement that the VP and general manager of Bendel’s is giving to the press. “What Bendel’s looks for is people who have good design sense … hip, young, fresh looks. And Monica’s bags are very in keeping with what’s hot right now.” Would she be here if she weren’t famous? “We did test the bags over Christmas  we did it blind. No press about it, no signs. Nothing to identify the bags as hers except the tag that says, ‘Made especially for you by Monica.’ They did very well.”

There are another 30-plus reporters standing behind a glass door directly across from the official press box, behind and to the left of Monica’s perch. They are squeezed into the door; it looks like that “Star Trek” episode about the overpopulated planet that needs to introduce new diseases to kill off some of their own.

Quick conversations with the few other print reporters here (“You know she’s not making a statement, right?” we are reminded regularly by various Bendel and Monica reps) prove that there are no political reporters here. One of the cameramen, though, is wearing a souvenir badge from the Straight Talk Express.

Noon: I go to size up the line. It reaches around the purse department, and all the way down the four flights of stairs to the first floor. And there are clearly natives scattered among the slightly louder, slightly more excited tourists. There’s a murmur through the crowd and I make it back to my post just in time.

She looks great. Like the lost Spice Girl — “Zaftig Spice” — or maybe her more mature and more conservative cousin. A sparkly pink top, a beautiful, close-cut black velvet coat embroidered with a few flowers. An explosion of flashbulbs greets her, followed by a series of attention-getting catcalls from the photographers. “Over here, Monica!” “Smile for Time, please!” “Paper magazine right here, Monica!”

Her smile seems genuine and slightly shy, but she clearly has done this before. She stands in the middle of the photographers’ semicircle and says, “OK, I’m going left to right,” and then turns her body and smile slowly, giving each camera a chance to catch her in a direct gaze.

12:05 p.m.: The first customers are stage directed by Monica’s handlers. They smile broadly at the cameras, cooperatively standing slightly to the side so that the press can get a clear view. “You look great!” they tell her. “Well, it’s the Jenny Craig program,” she says. What a pro.

12:15 p.m.: The first crew of photographers leaves and the second is shuttled in like a barely restrained herd of cats. I am nearly beaned in the head with a TV camera as its operator jostles for a clear view. Again, Monica announces her rotation, and again she is besieged with shouted questions that she responds to only with a smile, and flash bulbs pop like a breaking string of Christmas lights. It hits me that I am a member of the paparazzi! Mixed feelings of guilt and satisfaction.

12:25 p.m.: The woman from North Carolina, Mrs. Fluffy Hearts, appears with her husband and toddler in tow. Monica asks to hold the little girl and Mrs. Fluffy Hearts hands her over. The press goes nuts, and Monica and child do the slow rotation pose. I hear rolls of film click and spin as they run out. The girl (who is adorable) picks up one of Monica’s bags and puts it over her own shoulder; the press brays with delight.

12:35 p.m.: The North Carolina family has fallen into the clutches of CNN. Mrs. Fluffy Hearts tells the reporter that she “really likes the bag. You can put a lot of stuff in it.” What does she think of Monica? “I just think she’s a really interesting person.”

12:55 p.m.: The frenzy has settled down a bit, at least in the room itself, and the Bendel’s marketing genius begins to dawn on me. By placing Monica behind a counter, acting as a saleswoman to a crowd funneled in one at a time, they’ve capitalized on the customers’ mixture of admiration, fascination and Schadenfreude to the point where guilt takes over. They’ve made it hard to not buy a bag.

1:00 p.m.: Fifth herd of paparazzi. I’m guessing the end ratio of press to people is 1 to 1.

1:05 p.m.: A single guy in overcoat and thick glasses gets to see Monica. He breathes heavily as he asks to have someone take his picture with her. The camera crew buttonholes him for an interview, which I think is brave — I’m sure he’s on his way home to masturbate. He tells the cameras, breathily, “This is just very, very exciting.” I’m sure.

1:10 p.m.: Boredom sets in. Am paying increasingly more attention to the bags than to the crowds. They are nice bags. I don’t have any spring bags. I convince myself that it is my journalistic duty to get in line and buy a bag. Besides, this is the only way I’m going to get to ask Monica any questions.

1:12 p.m.: Squeeze somewhat unobtrusively into the line about 20 people back from the entrance to the department. Scribble. A woman asks me in broken English if I am a writer. “I am too,” she smiles, “from Hong Kong.” I am impressed. Is Monica a big story in Hong Kong? She laughs. Oh, no, she says, “I am reporter, but today I am tourist.” Aren’t we all?

1:15 p.m.: Two well-kept women from Darien, Conn., strike up a conversation with me. They are in town shopping, and just happened to stop into Bendel’s. They’ve now waited in line long enough to be a little excited, though. They speculate on what Monica looks like these days. The reporter from Hong Kong says that she saw her. “I don’t recognize her, she lose so much weight,” she says. The Darien women are not planning on buying bags, but they are looking forward to telling people about their adventure. They ask me several times how, exactly, to read the story I’m writing.

1:20 p.m.: A middle-aged blond woman in a screaming red coat jumps in. She asks me if anyone from the press has asked Monica “anything controversial.” I explain the customers-only policy. The woman in red sighs. “I can’t believe it. It’s some kind of national psychosis.”

This is the first anti-Monica remark I’ve heard (At this point, I’m not
sure even Ken Starr would wait in line this long.), so I ask her why she’s here. Her name is Betsy Gibson, and she’s a journalist too, she says, a radio talk show host with the Liberty Works Radio Network. But she’s at Bendel’s completely by accident. “Just happened to be walking by. But I’ll be talking about it tonight, I assure you.”

She has a tough question for Monica, she says. She informs me that Lucianne Goldberg is a regular on her show, and that she’s also associated with Goldberg’s Web site, Lucianne.com. She calls Goldberg and Linda Tripp “incredible women. They’re the ones who we should be lining up for, not a pathetic fat girl with no self-esteem. They are so brave. Can you imagine what it took for them to stand up to what the public would think? For them to risk everything?”

I ask her what her controversial question is. She tells me it slowly, making sure I get it down. “And you should be behind me when I ask it, get down what she says!”

The question is this, she says: “Why do you hate Linda Tripp? Don’t the American people have a right to know what the president is doing in an office paid for by the taxpayers? How can you get your life straight until you figure out who the real villains are?”

That is really three questions, I observe, wondering if she might not also query Monica on where she was the night Vince Foster died. “Maybe it’s a little too much,” Gibson agrees. “I should draw her in. Maybe I’ll ask it more like this: Do you really think Linda Tripp betrayed you?”

I have my doubts about this approach, too.

1:30 p.m.: We are now at the head of the line. Gibson goes in first, and I angle to get in line behind her. Gibson goes up for her one-on-one interview. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she starts by touching the bags, seemingly interested. Then she looks at Monica and asks her something.

Monica’s voice is clear, slightly alarmed. “I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking.” Gibson leans over the counter and starts to ask again, but the handler to Monica’s side is already on the case. “We have a problem,” the handler says to two guards. They surround Gibson and literally drag her away. Gibson digs in her heels, the guards pull her backward away from counter, and Gibson yells. “I’m being escorted away! Just because I asked if the public had a right to know what the president is doing!”

She passes me and pushes her face towards mine: “You see! You see! Write about this!” I try to convey that I am still undercover here, but really all I manage is a weak, embarrassed smile.

As she is “escorted” out of the room, Gibson gets a final word in: “Bitch!”

1:33 p.m.: My turn with the portly pepperpot. I am serious about buying a bag, a little dumbstruck about what to ask, so I grab two and ask her which she would choose. “A tourist today,” I think to myself.

Later, a woman next to the elevator — just shopping, she says — accosts a reporter to give her take on the affair. “I just want to say that I think this is terrible,” she says, “the only reason she’s having this draw is because of the scandal.” Simultaneously, a guy next to me tells his companion, “This is phenomenal. Good for her.” Then the women from Darien come by to make sure they’ve got the web address right. They get on the elevator going down. “What a trip to New York!”

It occurs to me that everyone here — from Besty Gibson to Dallas — is here for the same reason. Monica is famous, and that fame is enough. Call it history or politics if you want, but our interest isn’t even so dignified as to be puerile. We don’t want something as human as titillation; we just want to have a moment of fame for ourselves.

Before she can tell me which bag to buy, I find my voice and ask her a real question: “What do you think of all this?”

She shrugs slightly. “I’m just trying to move on.”

I ask if she feels like the crowd is supportive, if she feels forgiven. “I don’t know. The people here have been great.” She smiles warmly, and I feel like I’ve lied to her.

Then she suggests that I buy the peachy-pink brocade. “It goes with your coloring,” she says. Her blond handler agrees (“And I’m not even a saleswoman!”) I am inexplicably flattered. And convinced.

One hundred and sixty dollars later I walk away with my new bag, a signed note from Monica (in round, bubbly script: “Thanks! Monica.”), and just a sliver of self-respect.

A few viewers saw “Gummo” as a kind of aesthetic obstacle course. Even today, the Net (and the Lower East Side of New York) is littered with those who argue that the squares who don’t like Korine’s work just lack the intellectual strength to understand it. For Korine’s fans, ugliness equals truth, grotesquerie authenticity. They imagine that the art house has become a frat house, and it’s a wonder we’re not all doing shots in the lobby. (If there’s one thing to admire about Korine, it’s his skill for exposing the open sore of hipster insecurity.) For his detractors, “Gummo” merely provided a glimpse into a bizarre world where a discerning moviegoer might actually find common ground with Janet Maslin, who called
it the worst picture of the year.

“Julien,” sadly, is a movie that repeats Korine’s first picture so exactly that it drowns the few who found the brutal originality of “Gummo” its saving grace. The movie revolves around Julien (Ewen Bremner), a schizophrenic young man with fake gold teeth who walks the streets of New York muttering to himself, repeating phrases over and over until the syllables mash together. His exact relationship to the world around him is unclear. He lives at home, goes out on field trips with developmentally challenged youths and wears a bra and underwear to wrestle with his younger brother. He fucks his sister.

Unusually homely here, Chlok Sevigny plays that sibling. Director Werner Herzog acts as Julien’s father, a batty, violent drunk who rambles on about birds and does his best to humiliate his children even as he drinks cough syrup out of a shoe. He is the movie’s comic relief, a character half Great Santini, half Forrest Gump.

In being so preciously confrontational (does Korine really believe that the presence of handicapped people is avant-garde? Has he seen “Life Goes On”?), Korine implies that the point of “Julien Donkey-Boy” has little to do with the scenes contained within it. The movie is at once repulsive and clichid, and its lessons and themes are merely scattershot afterthoughts to the project of making a movie this bad — or, if you’re feeling generous, profoundly antagonistic. The film is remarkable only in that it refuses to give an inch to the normal conventions of what makes a movie, you know, enjoyable.

“Julien” was made according to the tenets of Dogma 95, the largely European movement based around the “Dogma Vow of Chastity,” which eschews, among other things, artificial lighting, costumes and props. With only one rather clumsy film under his belt, Korine couldn’t have found adhering to these restrictions much of a sacrifice. But there’s no doubt that the jarring visual roughness that the Dogma rules give “Julien” complements the equally discomforting narrative mode. Whatever Korine has made, it wasn’t done by accident.

But the deliberateness of his method doesn’t make it intelligible. There are occasional intimations that Julien may be some kind of Christ figure (he hosts an imaginary dialog between Jesus and Hitler, playing both the roles himself), but this may be a kind of SETI effect — random noise that appears to be a pattern only because we really would like to believe we’re not wasting our time.

Projects such as “Julien” exist not to explore the essentials of a film, but to induce in audiences a kind of critical vertigo. The filmmaker brings the audience to a precipice of discomfort, implying that the discomfort is itself the point. How else to explain the lengthy scenes of Julien bowling with retarded kids, slow monologues about talking birds or a discursive “magician” who regurgitates lit cigarettes? It all must mean something, right? It’s the film’s vicious little joke that it doesn’t.