by JOANNE LATIMER

Northfork is the kind of film you imagine Wim Wenders recommending to friends at a dinner party, adding incredulously, "And it's American!" Northfork may feel European, with its bleak humour and long silences, but it's a gem from the American fraternal duo Mark and Michael Polish. Their latest indie epic, after Twin Falls, Idaho and Jackpot, offers us a nutty mix of farmers, angels, orphans, preachers and stuffy ghosts in an anti-fairy tale about American progress. Brace yourself, I should add, for some magic realism.

The film is named after a town about to be flooded for a hydroelectric project. Northfork is dammed, literally, and the graveyard must be emptied, among other things. The faceless hydro corporation hires six grim-faced men as the evacuation committee to turf out homesteaders. The men dress like undertakers, drive identical Fords and deploy various schemes - both psychological and physical - to rout out the most stubborn citizens.

All these matters of plot are not readily apparent. The film cuts back and forth, feeding us tiny bits of information in a curious fashion. The first shot is a coffin bobbing to the top of a lake, followed by a collage of seemingly non sequitur scenes involving a collective of prissy ghosts, angel wings in velvet-lined guitar cases, and a dodgy preacher (Nick Nolte) who tries to sell an orphan boy. The boy is not just any orphan - he has feverish dreams in which he's a mythical angel roaming the plains, looking for home.

Because of this fuzzy plot and its peculiar structure, Northfork is exactly what you don't expect in a summer film release - it's smart and challenging, in a fun way. You don't watch the film as much as you assemble it, while flagging the star-studded cast. Like who? Peter Coyote and James Woods play two stoic men on the evacuation committee, while Marshall Bell builds an arc and collects two wives. Daryl Hannah plays an earthbound angel, while Anthony Edwards is her erudite cohort and British thespian Robin Sachs is the master angel. This loopy mix of actors and roles gives you an idea of why Northfork stands as a curiosity piece, filmed in just 24 days, and well worth its 96 minutes of screen time.

Northfork opens Friday, Aug. 1

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