‘Force of Circumstance’: Casablanca within the East Village

“Force of Circumstance” can’t maintain this suavely contrived combination of dis- and reorientation. Still, Béar’s spectacle of downtown artists taking part in spy vs. spy in an assortment of Washington places — a descendant of Louis Feuillade’s World War I serials through which implausible crimes had been staged on the streets of Paris — transcends the soggy plot, created in collaboration with the East Village author Craig Gholson.

Mysteries proliferate and evaporate like puddles after summer season rain. The envoy and the bodyguard wander by way of Georgetown looking for a colonial mansion. Mouallem, all the time carrying a brand new outfit, is rarely distant, hoping to contact the feisty journalist Katrina (Jessica Stutchbury), who’s having an affair with Hans (Tom Wright), the dissolute wealthy boy trying to unload his ancestral dwelling.

Béar, a central determine in New York’s Nineteen Eighties artwork world, has mentioned that her movie was impressed by the Casablanca bread riots in 1981. The film is dated much less by its historic references than by its green-character-displaying laptop screens and a solid seemingly culled from a Club 57 theme occasion: Major (a member of Squat Theater); a pre-Hollywood Steve Buscemi; the musician Evan Lurie; the scene-maker Glenn O’Brien; the efficiency artist Rockets Redglare; and the filmmaker Eric Mitchell, who solid each Stutchbury and Wright in his personal downtown films. Capped with a fez, talking some form of French patois, Mitchell brings his personal campy aura to the film, together with the portentous punchline: “Choice is a Western concept.”

The New York Times reviewer Janet Maslin, who had little sympathy for the movie, wrote that “the avidity with which Ms. Béar, absorbs and mimics big-budget clichés is a lot more impressive than the way those clichés have been used.” Indeed, “Force of Circumstance,” which appropriates a title utilized by each W. Somerset Maugham and Simone de Beauvoir, is extra an artwork object than a standard film, even ending with a display stuffed with precise paperwork, as a conceptual piece from the early ’70s may.

This fake “thriller” has a sustained look, an intriguing solid, an entertaining perspective and a propulsive rating. Its fundamental flaw is the script — which, given the present Writers Guild of America strike, makes it all of the extra well timed.

Force of Circumstance

Through May 30 on the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan; moma.org.