Remember Schizopolis? Probably not, and why would you? It had a quietly disastrous premiere in 1996 at the Cannes Film Festival, where seven years earlier its mastermind, a self-taught, 26-year-old filmmaker, had won the Palme d’Or for his first feature-length work, Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Accepting his prize, the newly anointed godfather of American independent cinema looked out across the crowd, paused and said, “Well, I guess it’s all downhill from here.” In a way, he was proven right by Schizopolis, a masochistic, quasi-autobiographical sketch-comedy psychodrama about a married couple’s communication breakdown.
At the beginning, the writer/director, Steven Soderbergh, who is also the film’s star, steps onto a stage to deliver a warning of sorts:
A riff on Cecil B. DeMille, the grandstanding speech is intended as a deadpan…