Émigrés in New York Who Aren’t Outsiders

The Manhattan subculture of upscale bohemian émigrés examined in “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” is a world that, so far as I know, hasn’t been explored from the inside with any depth. As you observe its central character, Asya (Élodie Bouchez), an ambitious conceptual artist, zip around New York in cabs and limousines, visiting art galleries and popping into parties, a multicultural vision of urbanity coalesces that is very different from that of a typical movie of impoverished immigrants trying to assimilate in an outer borough.

Forget its intimidating title, borrowed from a line in Jean-Luc Godard’s film “La Chinoise.” Although “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” has a steady undercurrent of post-9/11 paranoia, it is only obliquely political. And what the film’s writer and director, Zeina Durra, implies about the attitudes of Middle Eastern émigrés is much more complex than the popular cliché of persecuted pariahs struggling to fit in.

As Asya announces more than once in the film, she was born in Paris of a Jordanian father and a Bosnian-Palestinian mother. Her complicated heritage informs her art, which gleefully mocks ethnic and sexual stereotyping.

In the opening scene, in which Asya is the model for her own conceptual art piece, she poses naked, wearing an Arab headdress while gazing provocatively at the camera and barking orders at the man taking the picture. Because some of the shots feature Arab women bearing half-concealed toy guns, she is well aware that given anti-Muslim prejudice since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, these pretend weapons could be taken as the real thing and she might be under surveillance. In one scene she enlists her new boyfriend to help her dispose of them.

Contributing to her paranoia is the recent disappearance of a friend on a flight from the Middle East to Houston, and she wonders if he was abducted for rendition by the C.I.A. As her arty circle’s floating party drifts around New York, Israel’s 2006 attacks on Hezbollah in Lebanon have just begun.

Everywhere she goes, she encounters people with Middle Eastern connections glued to their television sets and worrying about friends and relatives stuck in Beirut. But despite these ominous portents, politics remains in the background like rumbles of thunder from an approaching storm that never arrives.

As played by Ms. Bouchez, best known for her starring role in Erick Zonca’s “Dreamlife of Angels,” Asya is an impatient, high-strung free spirit who resists surrendering to her fears. Early in the movie she hooks up with Javier (José María de Tavira), a Mexican medical student who follows her around and becomes possessive; in one scene he gets so drunk that she almost has to drag him upstairs. Javier counters Asya’s paranoia with his own history of trepidation after having grown up in a country where kidnappings are a daily occurrence.

Asya’s ramblings range from the Lower East Side to the towers of Fifth Avenue (where her wealthy family lives). At P.S. 122, she and Javier lose patience with a pretentious environmental art performance staged by an Argentine dancer. (They are polite when they meet her.)

If “The Imperialists Are Still Alive!” doesn’t go much of anywhere despite its peripatetic characters, that stasis seems intentional. In a question-and-answer interview in the film’s production notes, Ms. Durra disputed the common conception of Middle Eastern émigrés as people who feel like outsiders.

“The idea that Arabs and Muslims brought up in the West find themselves constantly torn between their roots and their ‘Western lives’ has always annoyed me since I never related to that conflict,” she said. “The milieu in which I grew up produced a different type of person: a wanderer.” That description fits Asya to a T.

Warning: appreciation of the movie is impeded by its dim, washed-out color and a substandard soundtrack in which some of the dialogue is only semi-intelligible.

THE IMPERIALISTS ARE STILL ALIVE!

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Written and directed by Zeina Durra; director of photography, Magela Crosignani; edited by Michael Taylor; production design by Jade Healy; costumes by Ciera Wells; produced by Vanessa Hope and Ms. Durra; released by Sundance Selects. In Spanish, French, Arabic, Korean and English, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. This film is not rated.

WITH: Élodie Bouchez (Asya), José María de Tavira (Javier), Karim Saleh (Karim), Karolina Müller (Tatiana) and Marianna Kulukundis (Athena).