Film - Jonathan Romney contemplates a wistful elegy to small-town America

Eric Mendelsohn's Judy Berlin could loosely be described as a small-town idyll - and, these days, not many reputable American films fit that description. We are so used to seeing small towns and suburbs portrayed as hotbeds of lurid dysfunction that this portrayal of a place where people sleepwalk through unexceptional, quiet, routinely troubled lives comes as a shock. The film takes place over one day when these lives come not to a cataclysmic standstill, but to a gentle, contemplative pause.

However, don't mistake this black-and-white, low-budget comedy for one of those cloyingly benevolent studies in Americana that used to sweep the board at the Sundance Film Festival (does anyone now remember The Spitfire Grill?). Judy Berlin did, in fact, win Mendelsohn the director's award at Sundance in 1999, since when the film has not been much talked about. But it gets a long-overdue British release this month and, watching it again, I realise that what I had taken to be a charming anomaly is, in fact, a rich and subtle minor masterpiece. Note "minor" - these days, only a fool bandies around that other m-word, but Judy Berlin's very minor-ness is what makes it exceptional.

A tolling bell accompanies a series of delicately composed shots of some genteel Nowheresville at dawn. Babylon, Long Island, seems to be no more than the sum of its gas station, telegraph poles, deserted junctions and empty schoolrooms. Then people wake to the sound of that mythical American presence - the passing train, hooting in a way that sounds deliberately archaic. It suggests the archetypal small-town movie scenario: someone is leaving, or has just arrived.

The one who has recently returned is David (Aaron Harnick), a young would-be film-maker, back living with his parents after some sort of crisis of self. About to leave is Judy (Edie Falco), dreaming of Hollywood stardom and whiling away her last day at the local history theme park, where she mimes farm work in a Puritan bonnet. This sort of image would be par for the kitsch course in most suburban- madness films, but it is about as flamboyantly eccentric as Judy Berlin gets; daft as it is, it is treated as nothing more than a job of work.

Meanwhile, David's parents are having their usual quietly tormented day. Alice (Madeline Kahn) is a hypersensitive belle, a skittish suburban Blanche DuBois desperate for reassurance; Art (Bob Dishy), a delicate, anguished headmaster, secretly carries a mutual longing for the brittle teacher Sue (Barbara Barrie). And Sue, Judy's disappointed mother, still nurses a wistful dream of a cultured, New Yorker-reading home life.

These days, a film such as Judy Berlin is considered commercial folly. There is very little story, most of the characters are middle-aged, weary and unglamorous, and even the younger duo are integrated into the ensemble rather than taking centre stage. Mendelsohn shoots them all as if they were phantoms, wandering around a ghost town - which Babylon effectively becomes when it is plunged into darkness by an inexplicably prolonged eclipse. These sequences of day turned night have an eerie, strangely festive mood: Alice wanders round suburban streets on a dark afternoon, whooping with childlike glee: "We're moon explorers!" The town's sudden plunge into night magically suspends events from their daily course, evoking a kind of sleepwalking state, a suburban Midsummer Night's Dream.

One thing that makes the film special, apart from Mendelsohn's witty script, is Jeffrey Seckendorf's soberly beautiful photography, especially the sky and landscape shots that make the everyday setting distant and extraterrestrial. The other is an extraordinary cast, who avoid all stereotypes and fill in the script's well-placed gaps with their own suggestive silences. The most exuberant is Edie Falco in the title role; getting to do rather more than in recent episodes of The Sopranos, she persuades us that, despite Judy's self-deception, this loud, immature wannabe could have exactly what it takes to succeed. Barbara Barrie's twitchy, punctilious Sue suggests flickers of melancholy electricity under the crisply self-deprecating shell. She has a whole subliminal telegraphy of quizzically twitching eyebrow and nostril, especially in her scenes with Bob Dishy, whose Art is a big, sad, tactful man bristling with secret delicacy.

As for the late Madeline Kahn, we know her as the flamboyant farceuse from Mel Brooks's films; but, here, she gives Alice a whole register of actressy neurosis and concealed hurt, all evoked in flighty gestures and a curious sing-song diction. Some of the film's performances, especially when staged in empty rooms, come across as theatrical, but that is exactly the point. Life has turned these people's personalities into parts to be acted each day; and the stagy tone, making the film all the more hallucinatory, paradoxically makes it all the more cinematic.

So many American small-town movies seem the work of mocking urbanites, but Mendelsohn's intentions are different. At one point, David imagines making a documentary about a small town, with no plot and no sarcasm, and we can take Mendelsohn almost at his (or David's) word. Judy Berlin is entirely without sarcasm, but it is gently, intelligently ironic. It is an extraordinary film, daring to be so undemonstrative that it risks being overlooked altogether. Way out on its own elegant, elegiac limb, this is a study of small-town America that, for once, owes less to David Lynch than to Chekhov.

Judy Berlin (15) is released on 1 December at the Metro, London W1, and selected cinemas nationwide

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