Cannes: Synecdoche, New York Still Looking for a Date to U.S. Theaters?

I love saying the name of this movie. Synecdoche. It means: "a figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for a part, the special for the general or the general for the special, as in ten sail for ten ships or a Croesus for a rich man." It's a play on Schenectady - one of the boroughs of New York. And, in true Charlie Kaufman style, the two terms are going to be inextricably entwined. Philip Seymour Hoffman is a theater director making an ambitious (understatement of the year) production about New York, love, death, "earth" (?), and beyond, and starts to fill an empty warehouse with actual life-sized buildings and ...real people (!) to live in and experience and communicate his version of the world. It's like Michel Gondry's ('Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind') Bjork music video, Bachelorette, on celluloid! The clips, while definitely fulfilling that requisite Kaufman tone, don't give away too much. Still, it's enough to pique my interest. I hope it gets a distributor soon, and I find it quite odd that not a single one has landed it despite its early showing and praise (Anne Thompson: “ambitious, arty and brilliant, if not entirely accessible.”) not to mention its most compelling draw - this is a Charlie Kaufman work!

Slashfilm has the three clips. (Hot Blog has them too.)
(Slash's is a bit more user-friendly, but can't be embedded as far as I can tell.)

IMAGE from: Variety