Cold Souls is a diaphanous nocturne—a little metaphysical flower lilting in the gray autumnal light. Paul Giamatti plays himself or, rather, the person we might infer Paul Giamatti to be, given the schlub-everyman he incarnated in American Splendor and Sideways. He’s playing in Chekhov on Broadway, but can’t get out of his own head and into Uncle Vanya’s. So, under his unseen agent’s advisement, he undergoes radical soul-removal surgery that leaves him literally spiritless. (I wonder if Steven Soderbergh opted for that procedure to make The Informant!.)

Cold Souls is cheekily prefaced by René Descartes’s assertion that the soul is a physical property, and, in the movie’s comic view, disembodied souls look like chickpeas and spitballs—Gobstoppers Everlasting. But they might as well be hearts; once his animus is extracted, Paul’s truly soulless as an actor and a human being. After some wickedly coy rehearsals, and a contretemps in which he advises a woman with a terminally ill relative, he switches over to the weepy soul of a Russian poet. (The test-drive spirits come from the Slavic black market, for which Nina—Dina Korzun—is a mule.) But when the inevitable time comes that Paul wants his own soul back, he discovers it’s been misplaced—transplanted into the noodle of sexy soap-opera starlet Svelta (Katheryn Winnick) under the pretense that she was embodying Al Pacino. Paul goes to St. Petersburg to literally find himself.

One friend said he could not reconcile the movie’s indie realism with its fantasy elements, but I don’t think there are any other ways to treat the material without betraying what it essentially is—a simple homily about appreciating the soul you own, and empathizing with those of others. If it were plopped down in, say, a Minority Report setting, the concept of soul-swapping would lose its obliqueness; the study of souls is such a queasy “science” that it’s better off left to the realm of complete fiction. The writer-director, Sophie Barthes, knows we can’t buy soul trafficking as a current trade, as popularized by a piece in The New Yorker; by placing this in the world of the familiar, she’s given us the distance we need to appreciate her metaphor. Her method is an index to her good humor, not her seriousness. (Similar concepts turn up as pseudoscience in The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s new page-turner, and I laugh each time they come up; these kind of conceits only work as pulp or poetry, and Dan Brown is no poet.) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a similar case; it can be summed up as “It’s better to have loved and lost…” But Charlie Kaufman has more of a Philip K. Dick temperament than Barthes; he’s dyspeptic, all right, but when he waxes poetic, it’s with a tricky tachycardia. Jumpy directors like Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry match his pulse. In Synecdoche, New York, however, writer-director Kaufman was victimized by his own volubility, and his ideas went kaboom. That’s the opposite of Barthes’s problem here. Her message echoes the sound, but tired, wisdom of everybody’s doting mother: “Just be yourself.” Cold Souls is a sweet, sincere little labor of love, but like most morality tales, it’s frail—a dream that fades when you rub your eyes, advice you shrug off before watching Sorority Row.

Barthes, a young Frenchwoman, has never directed a feature before, and her sophisticated sensitivity permeates the frames as a character all its own. But the movie is rather shapeless. If this were a more conventional film, for instance, there would be something tangible at stake if Paul didn’t retrieve his soul; there isn’t even a chance that he’ll lose his girlfriend, Claire (Emily Watson), despite vague intimations of a Paul-Nina relationship that culminate in a proto-Jungian blur. Further, Giamatti playing himself seems no more than a stunt, and just a little bit of a cheat. We see very little of Paul with his own soul intact, and none of normal Paul’s interactions with Claire—the assumption being, I assume, that we’re already familiar with Giamatti’s oeuvre. It cheats Giamatti more than anyone else because it forbids him from showing the sort of range a role like this promises. Perhaps the most lamentable omission is the wonderful payoff of seeing Winnick’s ravishing form nest the consciousness of a balding, neurotic everyman. Who doesn’t want to see a long-legged knockout Harvey Pekar?

The movie avoids opening any cans of ontological worms; but the difference between one individual’s soul and another is too ineffably fuzzy. Too great a distinction could’ve put the movie a pratfall away from broad comedy, but Paul’s conversion from Giamatti to poet is so introverted that we can hardly tell anything’s changed. Cold Souls suffers from being a tad too fickle and overrefined. I have sympathy for what the filmmakers were up against, but it’s hard to reseal cans of worms when one’s basic concept is a veritable can opener. However, the casting is adroit even when the cast doesn’t get its due. Watson’s hardness seems to complement Giamatti’s restive gooeyness the way Cheryl Hines complements Larry David. Korzun looks and acts ghostlike. And, as the suntanned soul-specialist surgeon, David Strathairn—who played the impeccable Edward R. Murrow—is so augustly preened that he becomes the deified scientist of yore, a silver-fox seraph presiding over a sterilized modernist domain.

In truth, I think many people will overlook Barthes’s flawed construction because the concept has the charm of a fairy tale for grown-ups; the movie’s assurances—that you should be happy with who you are—are naïve, but not insincere. The director hasn’t a cold soul, but, perhaps, a fragile one. Her movie is a wintry gossamer; but, like a snowflake, it’s graceful and unique. Barthes has a prepossessing directorial touch, and in this movie about soullessness, her tact is très spirituel.