Silent movies require a unique visual storytelling grammar, a rhythm of clear, economical medium shots, punctuated by close-ups of pertinent objects and human faces reacting. Veit Helmer's debut feature Tuvalu isn't strictly a silent movie—it features sound effects and the odd exclamation—but the film is virtually dialogue-free, and heavily influenced by the grammar of the silents and the fanciful retro-futurist decay of Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But Helmer has neither the clarity nor the rococo flourish of his predecessors, and his over-reliance on color filters and crammed, busy takes inhibits Tuvalu's ability to charm and enchant. The film stars Denis Lavant (the craggy but acrobatic center of the contemporary French cinema classics Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf and Beau Travail) as the manager of a swimming pool in a crumbling, depressed metropolis. Lavant spends his days tricking his blind father into believing that the business is doing well, while fending off his older brother, who's in charge of demolishing condemned buildings and replacing them with new, computerized wonders. The title Tuvalu refers to an island paradise far from the industrial wasteland depicted in the movie; Lavant hopes to sail there, preferably on the tugboat of lovely local swimmer Chulpan Khamatova, but accidents conspire to keep him at work, with Khamatova at arm's length. Tuvalu might well appeal to fans of Jeunet's Amelie, or Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge, or the Fritz Lang retrospective that's been touring America. It has an aggressively fantastic tone, laced with thwarted romance and the simple conflict of good and evil, and it's loaded with eye-catching style, even if that style obscures more than it reveals. But it's all more than a little arch, and too much of an exercise. Both the comedic and the dramatic set pieces are mired in theory: It's what might be funny or heart-tugging, buffered by layers of emotional remove. Even the anti-modernization plot, and the attendant "steampunk" art direction, displays some phoniness. Tuvalu is set in a world of cool-looking, old-timey mechanisms, yet the audience is supposed to join the hero in resenting the encroachment of new technology. In the end, it's just a matter of preference for one kind of contraption over another.