‘Zentropa’ (R)

A movie cultist's dream, "Zentropa" leaves its delightedly disoriented viewers in a twilight zone—it plays like an ideal collaboration between Wim Wenders and David Lynch.

As the mesmerizing image of rushing train tracks fills the screen in the eerie, extended opening sequence, a disembodied voice (it's Max Von Sydow!) intones a hypnotizing countdown: "You will now listen to my voice . . . On the count of ten you will be in Europa . . . " It's an effective and appropriate gambit—cinema is, in effect, a form of mass hypnosis.

When we "awaken" into the film, we are one Leopold Kessler (Jean Marc Barr, of "The Big Blue"), an American pacifist of German descent, who finds himself displaced and disoriented in 1945 Frankfurt. It's just after the war, and the national boundaries are blurred and in flux.

We meet Kessler's inscrutable German uncle ("I'm your uncle, you may embrace me"), who has lined up a coveted job for Kessler as a sleeping-car conductor on the luxe Zentropa Railways. The revived line, which once transported Jews to concentration camps, now moves American occupation forces through the starving postwar dystopia in high style.

In his duties, Kessler meets icily beautiful Katharina Hartmann (Barbara Sukowa), who clings to him in fear as the train enters a tunnel; after they (inevitably) become romantically involved, he learns her family owns the railway line. What's more, her father has Nazi ties, and Katharina herself may in fact be a member of the bloodthirsty Nazi partisan terrorist group called the Werewolves.

Kessler seems to sleepwalk through the widening gyre of conspiracy and counterintrigue, and "Zentropa" has all the characteristics of a disturbing dream—an inextricable meshing of sense and nonsense, impossible tasks to be completed, dissolving locales and juxtapositions of black-and-white and color images. Kafka himself would envy the way director Lars Von Trier unsettlingly instills alienation and paranoia.

Originally released as "Europa" ("Europa Europa" beat it to screens on these shores), "Zentropa" may be interpreted as an oblique allegory on unified Germany and on America's culpability and responsibility in the "new world order." Or it may be enjoyed purely on the merits of its wit and surface beauty, both of which are considerable. At once retro and futuristic, the hyperstylized film recalls every wartime-era espionage/romance/noir flick, and in particular owes a debt to Lynch's "Eraserhead," with its shadowy industrial backgrounds and throbbing soundtrack.

"Zentropa" is in English and German with subtitles.