B+

You may not be overjoyed at the prospect of sitting through a 220-minute, intermission-less feature about despair, grief and trauma, shot in black-and-white, with very little music but plenty of subtitles to translate the Japanese dialogue; but if you skip Shinji Aoyama’s remarkable, affecting “Eureka,” the final entry in this spring’s Shooting Gallery series of independent films, the loss will be yours. Like Atom Egoyan’s extraordinary “The Sweet Hereafter,” Aoyama’s picture depicts the aftermath of tragedy with both restraint and emotional power; and while it’s a very different from (and not quite the equal of) that 1997 Canadian masterpiece, it’s comparably compelling.

The film begins with a starkly-rendered mass killing, in which a deranged man randomly shoots many of the passengers on a bus in a provincial Japanese town. After the police deal with the perpetrator (who remains a blank, a deus ex machina who simply initiates the narrative), three survivors remain: the driver, Makoto Sawai (Koji Yakusho), and two siblings, adolescent Naoki Tamura (Masaru Miyazaki) and his younger sister Kozue (Aoi Miyazaki). All of them are traumatized by the episode: Makoto simply runs away from his family (his wife will eventually leave him), while the children are soon orphaned and living a withdrawn existence in their family home. In time Makota returns, takes a menial job and, in an unspoken attempt at redemption, moves in with the youngsters and becomes a sort of surrogate father to them, trying to draw them (and himself) back into the world of the living. There are difficulties, however: the siblings’ big-city cousin Akihiko (Yohichiroh Saitoh) unexpectedly arrives for an intrusive visit, and Makoto becomes a suspect in a series of local murders. Eventually all four of the house’s residents climb aboard an old bus, which they rehabilitate together, and go off on a road trip which–Makoto obviously hopes–can serve as a therapeutic experience for the children. The journey will in fact bring a kind of closure to their mutual tragedy, but the outcome will be bittersweet.

This synopsis might make “Eureka” seem more event-filled than it in fact is. Despite the serial-killer subplot, for example, it is hardly a whodunit or even a whydunit, and anyone expecting suspense in the unmasking of the murderer is bound to be seriously disappointed. The picture is, instead, a character study of individuals who have shared a traumatic experience and suffer its effects. There are long stretches where very little seems to happen at all, and static shots held for an agonizing time to create an almost hypnotic effect. “Eureka” is a film of pauses and silences, dramatizing the reality of grief and pain in a style that will certainly irritate some viewers with its leisurely, deliberate pace and its insistence on understatement. But it’s also a film of quiet intensity, employing simple techniques to build, gradually but inexorably, considerable impact. The acting is low-key but adequate to the director’s purpose, and Masaki Tamra’s cinematography invests the images with gritty realism that’s punctuated by occasional touches of surrealism.

Ultimately “Eureka” doesn’t quite match Egoyan’s treatment of the same theme, which achieved greater emotional complexity within a briefer compass and plumbed depths of emotion that the newer film only obliquely suggests. Nevertheless its mixture of hushed seriousness, serene beauty and underlying anguish give it a resonance that almost makes one forget, and surely allows one to forgive, its ample running-time. Appropriately for a film with this title, “Eureka” is a real cinematic find.

C-

Though Wayne Wang’s new film, constructed with the same heavy-handed artiness and literary pretension that’s characterized all his work, may get a reputation for steamy sensuality, it’s actually about two people who can’t connect emotionally. Unhappily, the same problem afflicts the picture as well. Though it gives the audience nearly ninety minutes with a young man and woman who spend a long weekend in a Vegas hotel suite, it doesn’t manage to create much empathy for them, and at the close it’s difficult to care whether they get back together or never see one another again.

The male half of the duo is Richard Longman (Peter Sarsgaard), a scruffy but brilliant computer geek whose IPO is about to take off. (Given the recent NASDAQ collapse, of course, this aspect of the plot is more than a trifle dated, but we’ll let that pass.) He links up with a lap dancer (and aspiring rock musician) named Florence (Molly Parker), to whom he offers ten thousand bucks to go to Nevada for a liberating fling. She eventually agrees, but only under fairly stringent conditions which will limit the hours they can spend in intimate activity and the sorts of things that activity can involve. Needless to say, the guy, an inordinately nice but fairly immature sort, eventually sees more to their relationship than a purely business arrangement, while the woman insists on keeping to the contractual stipulations they’d agreed upon, even though she’s obviously troubled by the situation. The ending may be taken as either hopeful or morose, depending on whether you take it as a chronological epilogue or as a flashback to the beginning of the story (since Wang plays with time repeatedly throughout the picture, shifting episodes around without much notice, it’s a debatable point).

Within the context of this sex-by-arrangement theme that recalls numerous earlier pictures, from Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) to Frederic Fonteyne’s 1999 “Une liaison pornographique” (released here last year as “An Affair of Love”), Wang wants to construct a parable of how the possibility of true human relationships is sabotaged by the intrusion of cash, but his take on the idea is too thin and insubstantial to carry much resonance. Nor is the picture genuinely erotic: there’s considerable nudity (much of it extraordinarily casual) and much intertwining of bodies, but it’s presented (like the rest of the picture) in a gritty style, accentuated by hand-held camerawork, that makes it all seem grim rather than sensuous. The fact that that’s the intended point isn’t much consolation.

The lead performances, on the other hand, are quite impressive. Sarsgaard is actually too handsome for the role of a nerdy high-tech whiz, but he submerges his good looks sufficiently to make him reasonably plausible as a rumpled fellow not at ease in the wider world. (This, along with his formidable turn as the brutal boyfriend in “Boys Don’t Cry,” make him a young actor to watch.) Parker lays on the anguish a bit thick, but her relative plainness makes her more convincing as Florence than a more glamorous actress would have been. The only other cast member who makes much of an impression (this s basically a two-character piece) is Carla Gugino, as an old pal of Florence’s who briefly links up with the couple in Vegas; her character is apparently supposed to represent a looser, more freewheeling attitude toward life and lust than either of the two leads can muster, though in truth it seems she’s worse off than either of them.

It’s the audience, though, who probably has the toughest time. “The Center of the World” (the phrase is used twice in the film, once to refer to a computer connection as the nexus of the modern “wired” world and then to a portion of the female anatomy as the real source of vibrancy) is ultimately so desiccated a portrait of a brief encounter that it will leave the viewer as despondent as its unhappy protagonists.