Melodie makes beautiful video poetry

The opening of Pierre-Paul Render's "Thomas in Love" plays like the famous beginning of "Betty Blue" as rendered by Pixar: instead of relentless sex in a beach house, a buxom computer-animated cyberlover gets laid in zero gravity. There are lengthy essays about machine-powered alienation here, and the movie keeps on trying to make similarly high-minded arguments. But the best moment of the opening sequence comes when the geek's post-coital bliss is interrupted by an instant message from his mother; "Thomas in Love" is rich on serious insights, but it works best as a comedy.

Director Render has an agenda, and to make his points, he and screenwriter Philippe Blasband came up with an intriguing setup: the film's protagonist is an agoraphobe who hasn't left his apartment in eight years. He communicates with the world through his computer and a videophone system. To underscore Thomas' claustrophobic vantage point, we see exactly what he sees: the movie screen is his computer screen, and only once do we get a glimpse of the main character's head.

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The rapid-fire images make for compelling viewing. The movie plays out as a series of videophone conversations with Thomas' mother (Micheline Hardy), insurance agents, psychologists, and of course encounters with his virtual girlfriend Clara, all narrated and commented on with couch-potato wit by the disembodied voice of Benoit Verhaert.

While Thomas searches for love in all the wrong places (including a hilarious online dating service and insurance-sponsored brothel), the movie stays afloat through its wild inventiveness. Ironically, Render's insights into the loneliness of a life lived online are undermined by the immediacy of the images on the screen: Thomas can't hide from all the people who are sticking their strangely tattooed faces into his life, and even if cybersex performed with spaced-out alternative girls in ridiculous suits doesn't quite count as social interaction, Thomas is certainly not a loner.

The hilarity ends when Render tries to wrench some emotional weight from Thomas' feelings for a sad prostitute (Aylin Yay), who, you guessed it, has a heart of gold and wants to rescue him from his self-imposed hermit existence. But the movie isn't equipped to seriously deal with sociophobia and agoraphobia, and its paper-thin conceit comes apart. As well as the first-person camera works for the exaggerated satire of the beginning, it cannot probe the internal struggle of its unseen main character - the final twenty minutes or so of "Thomas in Love" fall flat.

There are other parts of the movie that don't quite ring true - for instance when Thomas doesn't seem to be aware of a taboo against cybersex. Considering the ways in which the online world has mirrored or replaced the real world, would Thomas really not know about this? The open nature of the medium Internet should have left him more culturally savvy than merely an updated version of Chauncy the Gardener.

Like any good topical movie, "Thomas in Love" raises more questions than it answers. It suffers from the ambition to turn into more than a smart-ass comedy, but if you can ignore the flatness of the supposed real-life emotions and enjoy the ironic cyberfun, this film is worth leaving the house for.

At any rate, I need to go. Mom's on IM.