A touching, ill-fated love story

If you think you know Romeo and Juliet, watch Ghostlight. The film, which is playing at the MV Film Center, has the kind of quiet cinematic intelligence that sneaks up on you until it’s no longer intelligence at all – it’s about love of life and death.

Example: It’s morning, and Dan, who repairs roads in Chicago, gets up. “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow,” a line from “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from the musical Oklahoma! rings out in Dan’s voice as he drives to work in a perfectly ordinary van. This isn’t a musical. He’s in Illinois. It’s not pretty, and he’s not smiling. Something’s wrong. A subtle irony suggests that something other than male oppression is going on when Dan gets upset about Chicago drivers driving too fast and too close to his jackhammer.

Dan is pondering something. But the film doesn’t say what it is. Instead, the cuts and short vignettes in quick succession create a slight tension. Dan, directing traffic at his job, daydreaming, surveying the street, notices a small repertory theater across the street. Cut to the director’s office, where Dan is suspended with his wife Sharon and daughter Daisy – whose mouth is no longer as fresh as a daisy. Cut to Daisy on the street, facing a car screaming at the top of her lungs. Is the irony intended to create distance? Are these just scenes? Dan and Sharon’s tenderness for each other is deceptive and connects something unspoken.

Lightness dulls that tension or overrides real connection or the ability to connect with characters who are themselves at odds with their feelings. With a title like “Ghostight” – a stage light that stays on after a theater closes is meant to keep the good spirits of past productions in the theater – it’s obvious that this film is haunted.

Cut to Rita, a 50-something cast member in the repertory theater, who asks Dan to turn down the noise of the machines. Dan replies, “I really can’t.” As his colleague giggles, Rita, a nice 5-foot-tall woman, blurts out, “What are you laughing at so damn much about?”

Cut to a skit involving children, a moral message about anger management, to Dan’s cramped Chicago home, Dan, Sharon and Daisy in a cramped eat-in kitchen. What becomes clearer is that Daisy’s sometimes simmering anger and rants are laced with real focus and clarity. Cut to a school-mandated therapy session, well, not the session itself, but the waiting area, where Daisy walks in and Dan objects.

Instead, he wanders intently down the street until he peers into the tiny theater. On the other side of the glass, people are moving in a loose, wave-like improvisation. He steps in. “What’s going on here?” The performance the cast is warming up for is “Romeo and Juliet.”

Cut to Daisy and Dan in Daisy’s bedroom. “Ever heard of Romeo and Juliet?” Dan asks. Daisy: “Yeah, it’s a movie. It’s old, but good.” Then she speaks the “ill-fated lovers” prologue from memory with no problem. Cut to Dan and Daisy streaming the 1996 video with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Hmmm.

You know what I mean. “Ill-fated lovers,” possibly an ill-fated family. But what surrounds the film, the family, the simmering anger, the absence of something, is not directly stated. It is traced, assembled, broadcast. It is released, so to speak.

This award-winning film is not a surprise film per se. It is a ghost film seemingly wrapped in light (pun on film intended) scenes (pun on theatre intended) that stammer out and lovingly release a deep, tangled tragedy. It slowly wakes you up. It is worth watching.

Ghostlight will be shown at the Martha’s Vineyard Film Center on July 13, 14, 15 and 17 at 7:30 p.m. For more information and tickets, visit bit.ly/MVFC_Ghostlight.