Review: ‘Maya Dardel’ succumbs to the pretentiousness it aims to subvert

The best thing about “Maya Dardel,” a prickly character study posing as a provocation, is the chance to see Lena Olin dig into the title role. A formidable intellectual who, for amusement, chews up and spits out perceived lightweights, Maya growls and taunts, disdains and dismisses, and Olin could not be more commanding. It’s a powerful performance in the service of a movie that’s by turns off-putting, bracingly incisive and insufferable.

The action unfolds entirely in and around Maya’s upscale-boho house in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a rarefied realm above Silicon Valley. There, in her impatient rasp, the writer announces live on NPR that she plans to kill herself.

But this is no pity-fest; legacy in mind, she sees no point in producing work of dwindling quality. With no family to bequeath her estate to, she sends out a casting call of sorts. Wanted: an up-and-coming poet to serve as her heir and literary executor. Males only need apply. (“I don’t like women’s writing,” she says.) She doesn’t mention the casting couch, a key element of the interview process.

The contest narrows to two deeply uninteresting, schematically opposed contenders. One (Nathan Keyes) is all quivering delicacy, the other (Alexander Koch) jumping with assaultive swagger.

Luckily there’s Rosanna Arquette as Maya’s eccentric neighbor. The scenes between her gun-crazy New Ager and Olin’s elegant antihero require none of the overstatement that otherwise prevails. Setting out to skewer literary pretentiousness, writer-directors Zachary Cotler and Magdalena Zyzak too often subject us to the cinematic equivalent.

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Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes

Playing: Laemmle’s Monica Film Center, Santa Monica

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