At one point in Alan Rudolph’s absorbing and entertaining new film, someone asks Christie’s character Phyllis Mann, “Oh, are you an actress?” With a flash of that fabulous grin, unconsciously sharp timing and painfully self-conscious irony, she rasps: “All the time.” Phyllis knows, in a mid-life best described as pleasantly bitter, that the modest talent that led to her only claim to fame – years ago, as a minor movie queen in B-minus (mostly horror) movies – has also been the primary bane of her existence. Rudolph explores, through an odd sequence of coincidental events, what it takes to break her out of her latest, long-running gig as a frustrated wife and failed mother, a beautiful woman in her early 50s whose tragedy is that she actually no longer has a role to play, and who drifts, watching videos of her old movies and dodging the threat of any real emotion with self-deprecating wit and too much gin.

With Afterglow, writer-director Rudolph continues to hack out his own distinctive path through our sulphurous urban angst and the postmodern moral and cultural detritus of our times. (He has, on occasion, lost his way, as those who managed to sit through his Love at Large a few years back will remember.) Afterglow, produced by his mentor Robert Altman, is Rudolph’s most compelling film to date, marking a subtle but substantial advance over his previous best, 1984’s Choose Me. Here we are treated to the same lush visual vocabulary, the same cool affect that somehow manages to quicken rather than alienate. Afterglow is a wonderful mood piece; but it is more than that. Integrating coherently Rudolph’s dreamy, bracingly eccentric style, his sense of societal anomie, and his writing’s oblique narrative investigations into human relationships, Afterglow takes great cinematic risks. What gives the film its own afterglow is the grace with which Rudolph manages to keep his three-ring circus balanced. We leave the theatre not only not particularly bothered but actually invigorated by his unique capacity for juggling icy surrealism with an almost giddy lyricism, and clinical dissections of the human heart with plot elements straight out of Restoration farce.

The ruefully smoldering heart of Afterglow is Christie’s performance which – short of a possible “Brit-split vote” benefiting Helen Hunt – should win her the 1997 Oscar for best actress. Also helping Rudolph hold this odd, fascinating, and ultimately moving entertainment together are the three other lead actors: Nick Nolte as Phyllis’ cheerfully philandering handyman husband, Lucky, and Lara Flynn Boyle (of television’s Twin Peaks) and Jonny Lee Miller (Trainspotting) as a young couple facing their own marital challenges. More accurately, it is the fact that the couples are not facing what ails them that leads them astray (albeit, eventually, to a sort of enlightenment). Miller’s character, Jeffrey, a prissy young financier whose emotional circuits are clogged by his pretensions to a cold perfection of high-tech, hard-edge style, seeks to revive himself through an affair with Phyllis. Her maturity and romantic air of loss have the effect of turning the jaded young man into a positively medieval, chivalric knight. Concurrently – with each pairing unbeknownst to the other – Nolte’s Lucky has struck up a liaison with Boyle’s lonely young wife, Marianne.