When I saw Lynne Ramsay's prior feature Ratcatcher, I didn't quite know what to make of it; although there were clear signs of extraordinary talent and confidence, the film defied my attempts to explain why. More atmospheric than endeavoring to express a point, more into lingering in the moment than encouraging us to make connections between scenes, and more taken with colors than characters, Ramsay's 1998 debut was head and shoulders above most everything out at the time, yet so elusive that to translate the experience into worlds felt futile. Here was quite possibly a creation so utterly cinematic, so simply meant to be seen, that no review could do it justice.

With the arrival of Ramsay's sophomore effort, Morvern Callar, it's finally clear that we have a director on our hands who's definitely forging her own path and threatening to inherit the mantle of Europe's greatest contemporary film artist. Despite all its Oscars®, Almodóvar's last film Talk To Her was more an ossification of the Spanish master's usually vibrant style, France's Ozon is impressively versatile but not exactly groundbreaking, and in Germany, Tom Tykwer's few features to date have been breathtaking but have always kept one eye on Hollywood. How surprising that the long-moribund British film industry should find itself the source of aggressively maverick a director; in an age when the most exciting cinematic energy is being generated in such disparate regions as Japan, Mexico, and India, it's good to see the old Western world still has some original ideas left.

Of course, that doesn't mean anyone will have heard of, or get a chance ever to see, Morvern Callar; made over a year ago, I'd caught wind of the film thanks to an intrepid reporter on Salon.com about six months ago, and dimly hoped it might make the program at the DIA or at least end up on my video store shelf. Mad props to Madstone Theaters for taking a chance on such a challenging film, and even extending it to a second week here in Ann Arbor. Although I wasn't yet tired of the summer blockbuster fluff filling the other screens, my brain was ready to wrap itself around something a little vaguer than, say Down With Love's or Identity's more obvious appeals.

And it doesn't get much vaguer than this. Every time you suspect Morvern Callar is finally about something, Ramsay pushes that something to the wings and pursues another trajectory. Whereas the film's opening tableau seems to be a couple spooning in bed during the night, with some merchant's fluorescent sign flashing outside their window, you're pretty much wrong on all counts. Subsequent re-framings of this moment reveal that one of the figure's wrists are split open, he's lying in his own blood just outside the kitchen door, and the lights emanate from a nearby Christmas tree. (Any other director would've treated this like a punchline; Ramsay's not nearly so unequivocal, and takes her sweet time re-ordering your expectations.) There's clearly plenty of "pre-" to this scene, but Callar steadily forges ahead, expanding its aperture around this apartment strictly at a need-to-know pace.

The one inert body clearly invokes the question "what happened?", but the second person in the room no less teases our curiosity over "what's happening?" She's clearly very much alive, just lying there surveying the situation, and her blank face helps communicate her assessment of things not one bit. As she slowly makes her way about the place, we can't once ascertain how long they've been lying there, what the surviving party makes of it all, and what their relation might have been. It's not until she makes her way to the nearby PC and scrolls down the screen that we finally get a foothold.

"READ ME," reads the display, and further text advises "Don't try to understand - it just felt like the right thing to do." (If Hollywood ever re-makes this film, they'll of course have tears rolling down the girl's cheeks as she reads - but here she looks like she's just checking her E-mail.) There's more typed there, but she's apparently not in a reading mood - she pretties herself up instead and heads out for a party with her best girlfriend, leaving the body and the trail of blood behind it for another time. (But not before borrowing a few bills from the deceased's back pocket.)

It turns out the film's title is the name of this girl, played by the poppetish Samantha Morton (previously known to most audiences as Agatha the precog in Minority Report); as she hangs with her pals at a pub and later at a raucous house party, the brogue that obfuscates the dialogue indicates we're in a Scottish town somewhere, a place where apparently the parents are determined to give their children wildly original names. Her drinking buddies ask where her boyfriend is, and she replies, "he's at home - in the kitchen" (she ain't lying, at least), and there's nothing in her expression to suggest she's grieving, or in shock, or even upset by what's waiting for her at home. At best we can be certain that she likes to party, as the subsequent alcohol-fuelled and sex-filled montage illustrates; surely she's simply processing what's transpired by losing herself for awhile, we surmise. This won't be the last time we can only guess what's going on inside Morvern's head.

Meanwhile, Ramsay indulges an obvious affection for color, an insistence on framing her shots from creative angles, and (as in Ratcatcher) a focus on mundane moments that contain worlds unto themselves. What she refuses to do is throw us a bone and offer an even momentary glimpse of lucid character motivation; freeing us of all expectation, all we can do is observe, our brains filing away any and all plot elements in the hopes of connecting them to further developments and adding them up to a coherent rationale. If only we were so lucky.

When Morvern finally makes her way back home the next day, she steps over the body like it was a piece of furniture and returns to the computer to continue reading the dearly departed's last words. He speaks of a novel he's written, and he enjoins her to send copies of the manuscripts to prospective publishers. She eventually abides by his final request, but not before replacing the author's name with her own. Aha! Signs of a plot! we think. She's going to ride on the coattails of her lover's posthumous artistic greatness! She'll enjoy fraudulent literary fame only to later suffer a devastating fall from grace when the truth is revealed!

That does all sound juicy, but that's a script sitting in some reader's office somewhere in Los Angeles, not the impressionistic journey Ramsay's cooking up for us. As Morvern shows up for her menial supermarket job, visits her best friend's grandmother from time to time, and listens to the mix tape her rotting beau left her among other Christmas gifts (which comprises the most eclectic film soundtrack you'll ever hear), it's far from clear what her intentions are. (And though her novelist boyfriend says "I wrote it for you," it's not even certain she reciprocated that devotion to any degree while he was alive.)

It's all maddening but fascinating, but our limited grip on events serves to deepen Morvern's character; surely if a camera followed us around over the course of a few days, our actions would be contradictory or random enough to lead viewers to multiple possible interpretations of our personality. So inscrutable is Morvern's attitude when she finally moves the body to the bathtub and starts carving away that we finally abandon all attempts to pigeonhole the film and agree to go with the flow. Had Britain's other young turk, Danny Boyle of 28 Days Later, been in charge of this production, we've heard Morvern tell her friends "I'm going hiking with my boyfriend!" when she buries his various parts in the vast highlands, and we could finally label this a black comedy. Ramsay instead directs Morton to maintain an utterly innocent look, and after her man is interred about the countryside, you have a feeling that she's to get away with it, and somehow that's okay, and how little bearing it has on the tale as a whole.

After she whisks herself and her girlfriend off to Ibiza for an extended vacation, we almost forget that just before departure Morvern received a letter from a major publishing house expressing great interest in "her" novel. That scene is tucked away in an endless series of random events as the duo avail themselves of the MTV Spring Break-ish madness in Spain and dance and drug and boink their days away. Something's clearly on Morvern's mind, and she's behaving as though she's somewhat above it all, and even her best friend's confession that she'd once shared a carnal moment with her "missing" boyfriend doesn't faze her at all. Morvern's utterly free of concern, seemingly unencumbered by any thoughts of the future, and apparently sufficiently liberated to while her time away with trivialities. Her mood eventually catches hold of us, especially when she takes her friend on a surreal taxi ride away from the coast and into an isolated mountain village, and later leads them on a walking journey in the countryside with no clear destination (much to her pal's consternation, as she was perfectly content with the boys and the E back in Ibiza).

Her aleatory wanderings suggest she's trying out a fresh new start for her life, and she ultimately sets off on her own and makes camp at another resort where she meets up with two literary agents who flew over from London to discuss the publishing strategy for her brilliant first novel. She never even read it before she sent it off to them, and Ramsay never gives us a glimpse, so incidental is it to the film's larger schematic; Morvern simply regards this as a financial transaction, a source of income, and invests no concern in the novel's commercial or critical prospects. It's her dead boyfriend's final gift to her, a big fat paycheck, and you get the feeling this is all just a portrait of a girl who was once content with her circumstances back in Scotland, and is now content to be a free spirit, and has never entertained any existential musings on the difference.

Callar's documented stages of mourning over her lost mate? Exactly nil. This was not a girl who depended on her man for her sense of self - and she may not have been aware of that. Ramsay's unique take on things is in removing all sense of consequence from the proceedings; everything is incidental, including Morvern's ultimate fate after the credits roll, and the effect on the viewer is marvelously emancipating. For those (like this writer) who too often insist every second is precious, this film's cavalier attitude proves a refreshing counterpoint. Remember what her man said in his letter? His send-off constitutes a sufficient philosophy for the whole film: "Don't try to understand - it just felt like the right thing to do."

What Morvern discovers in the course of the film is freedom: freedom from financial worries, freedom from social obligations, freedom from the law, and freedom from geographical rootedness. Small difference from Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, who confesses to us the appeal of the pirate lifestyle: "It means freedom." Taking the prize for longest title of the summer, Pirates is twice as long as Callar but moves twice as fast. And whereas during the former film I could swear I had accidentally stepped into an Antonioni retrospective, here we're firmly back in the familiar territory of the Hollywood swashbuckler. The film's roots may be embarrassingly crude - Disney's intentions to renew interest in their theme parks by concocting films out of each of their rides - but it appears the pirate film was a genre ripe for updating, and with Pirates we've got an instant classic on our hands.

What is it with Disney lately? Their distribution deal with Pixar certainly struck gold with Finding Nemo, their recent update of Freaky Friday looks to be a hoot, and here they chose no less than The Ring's Gore Verbinski to helm the most unexpected hit of the summer. The last pirate film to see wide release, 1995's bomb Cutthroat Island, will only be remembered as the film that sank Geena Davis' career, and Disney had to know they were treading dangerous waters by green-lighting a project whose milieu feels as dated to contemporary audiences as would a western.

Shanghai Noon got it right when they recast the wild west as the basis for comedy, and Pirates tries the same approach; no one truly views pirates or cowboys as sufficiently threatening anymore for a straight action movie, so some revisionist comedy adds enough ironic distance to the setting that we can stomach it. And if you haven't heard, Depp's Jack Sparrow is a one-of-a-kind creation whose seemingly-perpetually-intoxicated comportment makes for constant farce. Whereas Samantha Morton's Morvern Callar consistently underplays it, Depp is all over the map in this gold-toothed, dreadlocked, mascara-detailed incarnation, maintaining an incongruous hauteur throughout an endless series of undignified predicaments.

Just as it's unlikely Ellen Degeneres would ever be considered for any acting awards for her inspired vocal deliveries in Finding Nemo, it's sad to think the Oscars® will in all probability overlook Depp for this comedic turn, when here's a true instance of a performance making a film. What we are witnessing is a truly creative act, a credit to the art of acting, and a hilarious performance that puts to shame the long-played-out shticks so many cinematic comedians have depended on for their livelihoods. Consider (*cough*EddieMurphy*cough*) yourselves (*cough*RobinWilliams*cough*) schooled (*cough*SteveMartin*cough*), gentlemen.

Where Pirates' script deviates from its generic predecessors is in not making Depp's Sparrow both the hero and the romantic lead. It's instead Orlando Bloom (of The Lord of the Rings series) and Keira Knightley (Bend It Like Beckham) whose conjoined romantic destinies have the misfortune of crossing paths with Sparrow's efforts to regain the ship that previously mutineered him off. While Bloom, a humble blacksmith of uncertain parentage, and Knightley, noble-born of a British governor of Caribbean territories and all but engaged to an admiral of the Empire's royal fleet, realize their mutual attraction, their island colony suddenly has to contend with an attack by the infamous Black Pearl, a legendary pirate vessel allegedly "crewed by the damned" and "captained by a man so evil, hell spat him back out." They've come for a medallion in Knightley's possession, and as cinematic logic would inevitably have it, the Pearl's accursed lackeys bring the maiden back to their ship with her, um, booty. This requires Bloom to give chase, and for some reason Depp is more than willing to come along - and considering his protean behavior, it's perfectly likely his true intentions are little better than those of Knightley's captors.

Bloom's a dead ringer for Luke Perry (not an unflattering likeness for most viewers) but with the bonus of a legitimate British accent, Knightley's never less than ravishing even while suffocating in her corsets, but the folks in casting went even one better and scored Geoffrey Rush for the part of Captain Barbosa, the leader of the Pearl and her mangy scalawags. There are precious few of Rush's generation who can communicate so much with a wide-eyed stare of can deliver a line with simultaneous menace and hamminess; I can also think of few who would revel in such a ravaged makeup job with mottled skin and reprehensible dental hygiene. Just as in his brilliant turn in Quills, Rush chews the nautical scenery like a master, and elevates Barbosa to one of the all-time great contributions to cinema's rogues' gallery. Of course, having the best lines helps, like his advice to his new (and nubile) captive: "You'd best start believing in ghost stories - you're in one!"

The Pearl's largely a floating graveyard, as Barbosa duly explains; he and his mates are little more than the undead after plundering a trove of cursed gold medallions, and the only way they can regain their humanity is by finding those dubloons they'd since scattered across the Empire and returning them to the resting place. One of those medallions turns out to be Knightley's, and she soon finds out her kidnappers are near indestructible due to their inhuman state. (There's also a monkey on board, and even it gets some brilliant scenes - the film's scriptwriters were definitely feeling generous that day.)

It's a relief that Verbinski doesn't sprinkle the supernatural proceedings with too much CGI - when the Pearl's crew are in moonlight, their true skeletal forms are revealed - and keeps this largely a swashbuckling affair; instead of over-indulging the film's scarier elements, Pirates provides a steady stream of plank-walking, cannons-a-blowing, sword-fighting, caves filled with schwag, parrots delivering punchlines, buried secrets three steps from the palm tree, and masts dangerously swaying in the stormy weather. Verbinski seems to have channeled a Fairbanks or two as he explores all the acrobatic possibilities maritime vessels can provide, and even with a running time over two hours you're not bored for a second.

Boredom's not a possibility, but we are at risk of being left behind by the infinite stream of rescues and captures and reversals of fortune and double-crosses and dissemblings - like I said, the scripters kept nothing to themselves for this project - and though it's made crystal clear that a few centuries ago to be a pirate is considered the lowliest of all stations, refined girls like Knightley still go for the bad boys (though it's not who you think). Some characters prove to be more than they seem, and others less, but all equally fear the balls and muskets above and the sharks below. Most fearsome of all, though, is the tour de force by Depp - how can an actor this gifted still go by "Johnny?" His obvious predilection for unconventional period pieces, like From Hell or Sleepy Hollow or Chocolat, may keep him from getting the actorly respect he deserves, but when other decent performers like Sean Penn can get Oscar® nominations for I Am Sam, then it's clear he ain't missing much. Jack Sparrow will endure in delightful cinematic perpetuity, Pirates sails into immortality thanks to its endless wit, and we all now have to wait nine months for another round of summer movie candy.