Like AMERICAN BEAUTY (and BRINGING OUT THE DEAD, for that matter), FIGHT CLUB is limned by a voiceover narration as Jack (Edward Norton) tries to explain why he has a gun in his mouth while glass towers around him are about to blow up. Like the main characters of those two films, Jack has been caught in a life-draining dead end of a job: he examines automobile wrecks caused by faulty cars and makes the computations required to discover if the tradeoff in human lives makes a recall cost-effective. Single to a fault, he lives in a condo beehive furnished with the best that the Ikea catalogue can offer, but he has no solace. Like Cage in BOTD, he can't sleep. He does find temporary respite in self-help groups for the survivors of various diseases and traumas, vicariously siphoning off their emotional energy and finding the sleep he needs. I kept expecting to see Stuart Smalley pop up at one of these meetings; instead Jack meets Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), another affliction junkie. But Jack's idea of a personal relationship is to suggest that they go to alternate meetings, so that she won't spoil his emotional voyeur's fantasy.

But Jack does finally develop a relationship when he meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a homemade soap salesman who seems to hone in on Jack's frustrations and offer something new. Eventually, with his condo suddenly blown to bits by a faulty pilot light, Jack takes up with Tyler, who begins a rigorous course of teaching Jack that To Live means To Experience--including pain, in all its varieties. They begin a Fight Club, where they and other frustrated males can beat the crap out of each other, producing the pain that reassures them they're alive.  The idea metastasizes and other fight clubs spring up around the state and country, until Tyler begins planning to destroy the very sources of social illness in a corporate, consumerist society. Marla has now also reappeared, as the third point of a triangle, and Jack's relationship with Tyler begins to fray.

With SEVEN, director David Fincher established himself as the master of a style that dresses existential hopelessness in snappy garb, rather like a grunge singer bemoaning commercialization while wearing $200 Doc Martins. SEVEN was a stylish but light genre version of a geek show that ultimately collapsed on the basis of its own logic. (If the killer really wanted to punish the 7 Deadly Sins, he wouldn't have gone after mere, venial Vanity but would have recognized that he was guilty of deadly Pride--and killed himself!) FIGHT CLUB is more ambitious than SEVEN and it is also more entertaining. Pitt and Norris are both very good, the Artist Known as Meat Loaf is surprisingly effective in a supporting role, and Bonham Carter has finally and forever sunken her Edwardian stereotype. For all the film's grotesque violence, FIGHT CLUB'S style is not as uniformly depressing as SEVEN's, and some scenes are very funny. But ultimately, FIGHT CLUB is a more crashing failure as well.

The problem is that, having posited Experience as the antidote to lifelessness, FIGHT CLUB first takes one wrong (if tempting) turn when Tyler takes his once-regimented office drones to a new level of regimentation in order to take on The System. And then the film introduces a Surprise Twist that further complicates the narrative. That twist might have had some effect if coming toward the end of the film, but the film continues to wring that surprise unnecessarily for more than half an hour, leaving an ending that is simply guilty of existential Bad Faith with everything that went before. In retrospect, the whole premise turns ludicrous, and I couldn't help thinking of how much better it would have worked as a Monty Python skit.

For an outsider, this "Sixth Generation" film is full of surprises, creating a work that would be provocative if it came from Europe or Japan but that is truly remarkable considering its actual country of origin and the fact that it is based on a true story.

Qi Lei is a young artist living in Beijing with his sister and her husband. A graphic artist who draws and makes woodcuts, he has rejected pictorial representation for the greater immediacy offered by performance art. His masterwork is to be a series of staged ritual suicides, each held on the first day of a season. He has represented death by earth, water and fire. Now he is planning for the fourth final act, death by freezing on the first day of summer--but this one is to be for real.

As he plans for the day, his relatives, girlfriend and fellow artists either try to talk him out of his plan, or encourage it, or remain non-commital. Qi Lei vacillates but becomes increasingly isolated and depressed, even though there are a number of scenes that are very funny or so grotesque that one is unsure about whether to laugh or not. One scene occurs when Qi Lei's sister plans to commit her bother to a mental hospital, only to have his best friend mistaken for the artist.  The desparation with which the friend tries to convince doctors of his sanity is virtually Kafka-esque. Another scene shows fellow performance artists engaged in eating a bar of soap. The scene's relentless observation is funny but ultimately moving in a way that I never really thought performance art could be.   And there is more than one final twist before the film ends, which I will not divulge here. I should add that the cinematography and lighting are at times ravishingly beautiful, in a way that belies the fact that it was shot on 16 mm.

As a record of artistic alienation, FROZEN would be interesting no matter where it came from. As a film from contemporary China, it affirms the nearly-lost notion in the West of a meaningful role for an avant-garde that seeks to redeem its society from cultural stagnation.