Around halfway through Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables,” the omniscient narrator is musing on the ways that the tiniest and grandest building blocks of life in our cosmos intersect. “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins,” he writes. “Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision?”
Good question. In Jem Cohen’s uncategorizable film “Little, Big, and Far,” an astronomer named Karl (Franz Schwartz) remarks that he was surprised as a child to learn that the stars were millions of miles apart, something he tells us while we’re seeing images of the night sky. From his point of view perched on Earth, those stars seemed crowded together, keeping one another company, all connected. This leads him to ruminate on how human relationships can contain vast distances, even when our bodies are in relative physical proximity. For instance, there’s the distance that’s grown between him and his wife of 40 years, Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), who’s also an astronomer, and who seems to be drifting away.
That sense of echoes between celestial bodies, our bodies and the tiniest parts of the world — the ways things like uncertainty and harmony and connection and memory are embedded in the natural world, as well as the more metaphysical one — is the theme of “Little, Big, and Far.” But I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful. Those who’ve seen Cohen’s previous films, including “Museum Hours,” will have a sense of what they’re in for; I’ve seen “Big, Little and Far” described as an “epistolary essayistic docu-fiction hybrid,” which is accurate but not all that illuminating.
Epistolary, because most of the dialogue in the film is in the form of letters between Karl and a younger colleague, Sarah (Jessica Sarah Rinland), who is forming a relationship with Mateo (Mario Silva), also an astronomer. Karl and Sarah share their thoughts about their work, their relationships, their lives and the things that draw them to the stars. Often we’re hearing their letters while seeing images of a giant telescope, people on a town square, traffic whizzing by on the highway, the natural world, the lights in the night sky. We hear a little from Eleanor, too, who speaks about watching an eclipse from a mall parking lot and being just as fascinated by the way the other observers, mostly strangers to one another, form a little community for the moment.
During this rumination and many others, most images we are seeing are of real people going about their real lives, whether it’s riding the light rail in Vienna or sitting on a folding chair and watching a solar eclipse. In one stretch of the film, Sarah’s voice reflects on whether museums, as she puts it, must be “places not only of knowledge, but of mourning” in an era in which species are disappearing from Earth at fearsome rates. As we listen, we watch people milling about a natural-history museum, looking at the displays, seemingly unaware of the presence of a camera.
It’s right to call “Little, Big, and Far” essayistic, too. It’s an exploration without a single endpoint, a meandering journey that weaves together stories that don’t resolve at all. The meditations wander from rocks and stars to life and love, then wander back again, almost dreamlike. (The first time I saw it I was fighting sleep because it felt a bit like a lullaby for the end of the world — don’t go in drowsy.) Everything, in a way, is contained in its two hours, which telescopes in and out of space and time. What your mind snags on will be specific to you; I suspect the film will change shape depending on who’s watching it, and which field of vision they’re oriented toward at that moment.
There isn’t much of a plot, nor much of an explanation, to “Little, Big, and Far,” which is more of a philosophical outing than a story. Its appeal to the individual viewer will depend on how alluring that description sounds, since a movie of this kind both defies expectations and demands a high degree of attention from the audience. But it also feels spiritually nourishing in a way few films can manage. The title comes from Karl’s simplest take on what he does, as an astronomer: “We try to understand three things — little, big and far,” he says. “And these three things, it turns out, are not separate, but intertwined, completely intertwined.” Everything, when you get right down to it, is knit together with everything else.
Little, Big, and Far
Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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