Before it evolved into a dreamlike melodrama about a young, pregnant Russian woman's emigration to New York, Tony Pemberton's indie oddity Beyond The Ocean was conceived as a "fake foreign film," with eastern Ohio as a stand-in for Hungary. In many crucial respects, nothing has changed. Pick any five minutes at random, and the film seems to announce a major new talent, an American with a uniquely global sensibility and an eye for images that recall the Eastern European and Soviet art cinema of the '60s. Like George Washington, it stands out as a low-budget production shot in 35mm Cinemascope, vacillating between evocative color photorealism in New York and black-and-white scenes in provincial Russia that could be mistaken for Andrei Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood. Add to that an ambient sound texture by Austrian electronica composer Christian Fennesz, and it's easy to see why Variety singled out Pemberton as one of its "10 Directors To Watch" in the new millennium. But once the show reel is all pieced together, Beyond The Ocean doesn't have the content to match the form, never cohering into anything more substantial than a glum navel-gazer about a little girl lost, unable to find a permanent home (literally or figuratively) on either side of the Atlantic. Sensitively played as an adult by Dasha Volga, she arrives in New York like Eszter Balint in Stranger Than Paradise, with no one expecting her and nothing in her possession but a single suitcase and some broken English. Volga intends to live with her boyfriend Rik Nagel, a recent émigré to America and the father of her unborn child, but soon discovers that he has no interest in starting a family with her. Slightly guilty over turning her away, Nagel arranges for her to stay with his friend Sage, a spacey trip-hop aficionado who behaves like a suburban kid who modeled himself after Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now. Drawing a too-neat bridge between past and present, Pemberton flashes back to Volga's troubled childhood, when her mother (Yelena Antimova) treated her like detritus from a bad marriage and her only friend was an uncle (Donovan Barton) who often gave her the wrong kind of attention. It's never clear whether the flashbacks are Volga's memories, in which case they include scenes she couldn't have witnessed, or Pemberton's own impressions of her childhood, in which case they're too on-the-nose psychologically. There's no arc to her story, with little learned, nothing gained, and an ending that's suitably fuzzy and oblique. Anyone who can conjure up images as beautiful and varied as Pemberton's merits attention. But in Beyond The Ocean, they float unhitched to anything particularly meaningful.