image-conscious, pro-choice parents. Of course, the abortion is bungled, and poor Aviva — who only wants to love and be loved by her own flesh and blood, dear thing — is rendered barren. From there, the story breaks into a kind of Huckleberry Finn haze, with Aviva literally drifting downstream and washing up at the house of Mama Sunshine, an evangelical Christian with a seeming addiction to adopting "differently abled" children. Oh, and somewhere along the way, she sleeps with a pedophile trucker. ("Turn over," the guy tells her in bed. "Okay," she says. "Can I still get pregnant if we do it this way?") And an abortionist is killed. And his little kid. It may seem like I'm giving away too much, but I promise — there's nothing to ruin here. Palindromes is an ugly, empty tale whose characters ring false. Ellen Barkin, who plays Aviva's mom, may think it's the best work of her career, as she has stated at various film festivals, but her character's self-righteous liberal narcissism is so over-the-top it loses all meaning. Mama Sunshine's husband is a pro-life Christian so evil he should be twisting the ends of his handlebar mustache.

   The big, artsy-fartsy gimmick of the film, cribbed from Luis Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire, is that Aviva is played by different people, including a young boy and a very large black woman. "On the one hand it throws in relief this idea of change versus stasis — how for all the sordid, traumatic, difficult, emotionally devastating kinds of experiences [Aviva] goes through, she remains an innocent from beginning to end," Solondz told The Austin Chronicle. "And yet we see all these metamorphoses of size, shape, color, and sex, and so forth take place. So, for all these changes that are constantly taking place with all of us, we are also at the same time paradoxically remaining the same."

   It's an interesting conceit, but it fails. The effect de-humanizes Aviva rather than giving her experience any resonance. It's a Brechtian distancing technique that forces us to think about what we are watching rather than to feel and sympathize with it (like we might have in Welcome to the Dollhouse, to which this film is a semi-sequel). That might be all right if Solondz gave us anything to chew on thematically, but this is what he comes up with: Both sides of the abortion debate can be irrational, hurt children often find sad ways to soothe themselves, and people never change. Umm, great. Thanks.

    Storytelling showed early signs of such artistic slippage. It was divided into two sections, which gave the odd impression that Solondz didn't trust the narrative of either. But the films do mesh nicely, even if their discussion of the symbiotic relationship between artist and subject isn't as accessible as dysfunctional siblings and middle-school angst. With its washed-out tones, head-scratching racial issues, IFC in-jokes and defensive stance against criticism, Storytelling was a movie designed not to please. But it's actually quite good at times: As Scooby, a numb high schooler poisoned by popular culture and boredom, Mark Webber is one of the most convincing teen actors I've seen in some time. But Solondz can't resist pushing his characters to hyperbole — to baffling acts of violence and cruelty — and they become pawns in his sad worldview rather than human beings. With Palindromes, Solondz seems hell-bent not to repeat the mistake of Welcome to the Dollhouse (that is, to make a film so fraught with familiarity and pain that all who watch it relate to its lead character). Solondz wants to insist we can't feel her pain, that we could never understand her — and, by extension, him.

    Curiously, Palindromes begins with the funeral of Dawn Wiener of Welcome to the Dollhouse. We learn that she endured a lifetime of failure and eventually killed herself. "I hope I don't grow up to be like Dawn," Aviva tells her mother, but of course she will. Why? Because life is cruel? Because things don't always turn out for the best? Or because happy endings, even plausible ones, are for other directors? By dwelling solely in the ugly crevices of human nature, Solondz has limited himself. He's already broken taboos. He's already taken on censorship. He's spoofed family values, politics, youth culture, even his beloved filmmaking. What's left in his arsenal? If Palindromes is any indication, it's a big bag of nothing.