Crash? No. Altman? No? Bukowski without the fun? Perhaps.

This stop-motion clay animation film has a scattered, episodic plot -- a handicap that, despite some technical accomplishment and good actors doing the voices, it never overcomes. It concerns people living in an apartment building. Whether it's located in Sydney or Tel Aviv seems to be unclear. This is said to be the first Israeli-Australian film co-production. The filmmakers are Israeli, many of the the voice actors, Aussies. What is clear is that the effect of the collaboration is distinctly downbeat. It left me feeling depressed not only due to the subject matter but also from wasting two hours. Well, it felt like that. It was really only 78 minutes.

At the outset, before the opening credits, a man on the street resembling Bob Hoskins refuses to give a homeless man a dollar. The homeless man pulls out a revolver. The Hoskins type still refuses to give him money even under this extreme pressure, and as he walks away, the homeless man shoots himself. The film never achieves this level of intensity again.

Later the homeless man comes to visit the Hoskins type as an angel with wings. Hoskins' 28-year-old son lives with him and is unemployed; he has another employed son who's a re-possessor. The stay-at-home son gets fired from a one-day tryout on the repossession team for helping a man avoid having his appliance repossessed. A magician. A little boy grows so fond of his piggy bank (he takes it in to Show and Tell at school) that he won't smash it when it's full and secretly "sets it free" outdoors.

A supermodel likes her men smooth, not only hairless -- but boneless. Here the film moves into the realm of the grotesque and creepy, and it remains in a zone of the pointlessly weird to the end.

Also strange is another young man who is visited by matchstick-size frat boys who drink tiny beers and share joints with him. Is he the one who is heartsick because he and his girlfriend are estranged? The young men are hard to tell apart.

In a final flight of fantasy the unemployed son and his by now deranged father (burdened by guilt after the "angel," apparently still mortal after all, falls to his death from the apartment), follow a book on "How to Swim Like a Dolphin." This film suffers from a screenplay that never seems to know where it's going.

The trouble with "claymation" figures is that even when they look like real people, they appear dead. All the figures' lips look stuck on. The effect of the story, limited to a confined world like a Christmas garden seen up close, is claustrophobic. It's not that the film isn't adept technically. Skillful it is, at making faces and figures move. Though when they walk there's a limping, jerky effect, facial expressions are lifelike. But when you see a clay face weep, it's disconcerting because that remind you the face is clay.

The film interweaves the lives of twelve characters, and is based on the stories of Israeli writer Etgar Keret. This interweaving has led to blurbs comparing $9.99 with Crash and Altman's Short Cuts: false advertising. No such levels of significance or quality are achieved here. Several characters are voiced by famous actors, including Anthony La Paglia (the Hoskins type) and Geoffrey Rush (the suicidal homeless man). As a SF Chronicle review comments, most of the characters are "broke, addicted, depressed, or crazy." There is sex, one case of male frontal nudity, and profanity. This isn't for kids by a long sight.

Tatia Rosenthal is an Israeli animator of talent and dedication. The short stories of Keret are puzzling and grim; in these juxtapositions, though the screenplay is by Keret himself, they never really come together in a coherent way, except to produce a unified sense of futility. The effect of episodic storytelling, tendentiousness and failed or marginal characters suggests Charles Bukowski -- but without any of the liberating lowlife zest of Bukowski's don't-give-a-damn world-view. Fans of the bizarre may be attracted by the film, and devotees of stop-motion animation, one supposes, might consider it a must-see. Others should studiously avoid it.


($9.99 was included in the New Directors/New Films series at Lincoln Center in March 2009. It began a limited US theatrical release in June.)

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.