‘Uncle Paddy’s Wake’ (NR)

"Uncle Paddy's Wake," the premiere video work by the local guerrilla filmmaking group known as the Betapunks, is brimming with audacious promise. Shot on Beta in nine days around Adams-Morgan, the video percolates with pontifical chatter. Its characters -- all members of an extended dysfunctional family who've gathered on the occasion of their fabled Uncle Paddy's tragic death in India -- indulge in eloquent overlapping monologues about their dreams, art, the environment, love and the essential nature of life, without ever hearing each other. They're brainy but self-absorbed, deaf to each other's pain.

Sean Harris, who wrote and directed the piece under the name of Spikey Blue, gives these disjointed reveries a rhapsodic loopiness. The characters' constant struggles to define themselves, to find words for themselves, are desperately funny. They're a mess, these navel-staring kids. Richard (who's played by Ingo Tusk, another pseudonym for Harris) is a songwriter who wants to bring opera to the masses, but seems more obsessed with the girl he keeps calling back in New York. His twin brother Tim (Chris Corr) is at the end of his rope with his career and his beautiful but neurotic wife, Annie (Thanda Tin), who subjects herself to endless medical tests to determine why she can't get out of bed. Their baby sister, Ramona (Rebecca Gaffney), spends most of her time in psychiatric analysis, narrating her ecological dreams into a tape recorder for her shrink.

"Do you promise not to spit on anyone wearing a fur coat?" her doctor asks.

"I want cobras to slither into their beds at night and bite them," she answers. "And I want Skylab to fall out of the sky onto their doghouses. And I pray that they die of throat cancer. But I won't spit on them."

The dark-haired Ramona is the keeper of the family secret -- specifically, that she's really the daughter of her Uncle Paddy and her grandmother, who's locked away in an institution communing with herself. The piece is not without incident; there's a little taste of brother-sister incest and a scandalous episode near the end in which Uncle Paddy (Jerry Garcia) turns out to be very much alive.

The video is more vibrant in its characters, its language and its style than in its story. Harris calls it a "drawing room black comedy," and that's close to apt. Harris and his co-producers, Thanda Tin and Eric Gravley, have made beautiful use of their video technology, giving the piece a smooth-flowing visual surface. Shot in long, clinically detached vignettes, it has something in common with the deadpan anomie of Hal Hartley (he made "Trust" and "The Unbelievable Truth"). And it has the same arch, obsessively over-literate quality. It's full of messages -- so many, in fact, they clog the progress of the narrative.

The story line is secondary, though. Talk is the video's essence; it revels in compulsive self-expression. And it barely pauses to notice if anyone's listening. Though it's not yet fully realized, there's real talent here and enough ideas for five movies.