How to Shoot a Ghost (short), on Criterion Channel

There are scary ghosts like The Changeling and The Haunting, funny ghosts like Topper and Blythe Spirit, and sad, regretful ghosts like Casy Affleck in A Ghost Story. These two ghosts are definitely the latter. You could almost call them depressing, but they deserve a little slack, since they are newly dead. Sadly, their lives did not work out as they hoped. Spending their afterlives in a strange city also seems like a tough break, but they find some kind of companionship with each other in Charlie Kaufman’s short film How to Shoot a Ghost, which premieres Sunday on Criterion Channel.

He is a translator and she is a photographer, but both were profoundly unhappy. (According to the closing credits, they are Anthi and Rateb, but you wouldn’t know that from listening to their monologues). It seems vaguely implied they both also self-medicated through the hedonistic Athens nightlife, which may have in some ways led to their demise. They were expats largely unfamiliar with the city, but now they are evidently stuck there. Apparently, ghosts can’t travel.

Rather logically, the ancient city has many ghosts (whose pictures Anthi constantly snaps—call it ghost photography), but you’d want to give a lot of them a wide berth. Maybe those are the one screenwriter Eva H.D.’s anti-American narration blames on “CIA torture chambers.” In contrast, she expresses no such sympathy for those assassinated by Communist paramilitaries, like journalist Nicholas Gage’s mother Eleni Gatzoyiannis (as documented in the film Eleni).

Maybe Kaufman’s short should have talked less, because Ella van der Woude’s score is quite expressive, especially the eloquent tenor, alto, and bass clarinet solos contributed by Hristo Goleminov. Jesse Buckley and Josef Akiki voiceovers for the photographer and the translator are appropriate meditative and mournful, as well. The disembodied rendering of their voices is initially distracting and distancing, but it is also admittedly quite ghostly.

Kaufman definitely conveys the sense that the two main characters had not been fully living for quite some time before their deaths. Indeed, that is the real tragedy of the film. Ghosts do not get much sadder than them, except maybe the ones they avoid.

However, as a drama Kaufman’s short is a rather watery brew. Nevertheless, Michal Dymek’s elegantly morose cinematography and the evocative soundtrack will likely be sufficient to satisfy many cineastes. It is often beautiful, but always hollow inside. Only for Kaufman completists, How to Shoot a Ghost releases thus Sunday (3/1) on the Criterion Channel.