I'm so tired of being alone that I can't even stand my own company

And tonight I went to the Brattle with rushthatspeaks and derspatchel to see Paul Fejos' Lonesome (1928), a mostly silent film mostly set (although mostly not shot) at Coney Island. It's a fascinating collage of modern documentary and romantic melodrama; I thought at different points of Tati's Playtime (1967) and Weegee's New York (1948) and not as much Metropolis (1927) as I would have expected, considering it opens with painted skyscrapers and the superimposed hands of a clock tick round the working hours of our two protagonists' lives. She's a switchboard operator, the air around her as crowded with callers' chattering faces as her ears must be with their noise. He works a drill press, punching razor blades out of sheet metal while the numbers roll slowly up on the manual counter. Both are lonely, socially awkward—manifesting in her case as a kind of wistful reserve, as when she turns down going out with friends to shift restlessly around her apartment in the exhausting third-of-July heat; his is a more comic pathos, signaled the minute he sleeps through his alarm and has to dress with such frantic disorganization that the viewer is uncertain whether he's going to leave for work before or after he remembers to put on a shirt—and when they discover one another among the holiday weekend crowd, it could be anything from the beginning of a beautiful friendship to the last straw of urban alienation, especially once the consequences become clear of never even exchanging last names. (Ask Rush about their update for the age of social media.)

The sound scenes are stilted. There are three of them; they were added partway through production; the first scrapes through, ironically, on the strength of Glenn Tryon's stiff delivery (he is such a fluent and physically comfortable actor whenever he doesn't have to be heard, mime-gifted, with a face that's earnest go-getter by genetics and shlimazl by expression most of the time, Rob guessed some of it had to do with keeping to his marks for the microphone), as his Jim tries too hard to put himself over as a self-assured swell and neither Barbara Kent's Mary nor the audience is buying it, but the other two are notable mostly for their visual framing and a striking use of hand-tinting, which none of us were expecting. When he's not chained to a soundstage, Fejos excels at motion and montage, creating the same density of textures on the screen that a sound engineer might mix in the studio to communicate New York in all its honking, teeming, never-sleeping maelstrom and progress. The elevated rattles and bangs over the streets where horses' hooves still jostle for attention with car horns and the countless feet of pedestrians. Whistles blow off-shift, their scream of a steam-plume held in the foreground as the camera crossfades from Jim's station to Mary's switchboard, both of them responding. Truly unbelievable amounts of confetti rain down on the midway, visual white noise. And he may have filmed most of his Coney Island at The Pike in Long Beach, California (there was never a coaster called the Jack Rabbit Racer at Coney), but he gives us so many details of the rides and the games and the lights and the boardwalk and the funhouse and the donkey cart and kewpie dolls have never not been terrifying that I began to feel I had actually spent the evening at an amusement park, fortunately with the two people I would most like to spend an evening at an amusement park with. There is color scattered throughout these scenes, glowing sometimes for realism (the incandescent skyline of Luna Park, one of the location shots) and sometimes for emotion (the dreamy violet haze of the ballroom where Jim and Mary dance for the first time to Irving Berlin's "Always," a stave of which floats at the bottom of the screen complete with lyrics—did Peter Greenaway see this movie?) and it never feels like a stunt; it is like the moments in a musical where the only way for a character to express themselves is to abandon speech and sing. It is never as schematic as opening a door into Oz. It almost saves the second sound scene, when the crowds on the beach melt away into darkness and Jim and Mary could be on the stage of a theater, black boards underfoot and the colored lights of Coney running like an abstract behind them. (Then they start speaking.)

I don't know if I am making the film sound better than it is. In every way, I found it technically fascinating. It is surprisingly subtle in some of its observations, as when Jim and Mary romp uncomfortably in the surf, knowing they're supposed to be having fun like all the couples around them and not quite sure if they're doing it right (it's not that their mutual interest is feigned, but they're a pair of introverts who just met trying very hard not to look self-conscious; they laugh most freely when a wave knocks both of them over, nothing they could predict), and if it can go completely expressionist for moments like the wheel of a wooden coaster catching fire (does not happen all that often, Rob tells me) or a storm breaking apart not only the night's festivities but Jim and Mary's fragile relationship, it's also capable of restraint when it needs to be. The twist ending would be unendurably schmaltzy except that the camera refuses the visual equivalent of swelling violins, keeping all the emotion in the song we know is playing because we saw the label on the 78. I could list individual shots and bits of business I loved. There were also headdesk moments aplenty and I don't know why anyone was surprised at the Irish policeman. For once, though, and I appreciate this immensely, I don't have to yell at Criterion to put the thing out on DVD.