How many artists are successful in two different mediums? I don’t mean proficient; I mean as good in one as in the other? There’re lots of musicians who write middling to horrible poetry, and God save us from all the lame “novelist rock bands,” especially those comprised of ever-infantilized baby boomers.

Okay, Shakespeare—plays and sonnets—but his plays were poetry, so I don’t think he gets credit. Yeats was a painter from time to time, but who clambers to see what he wrought? Julian Schnabel did a fine job crossing over to film recently, but is that a trend? Am I overlooking obvious exceptions? This is a sincere question, one that might prove a good, pretentious conversation starter at your next gathering of longhairs. What prompts my query is a viewing of Paul Auster’s film The Inner Life of Martin Frost.

Released to mostly negative reviews, this was Auster’s second attempt at solo filmmaking. His first venture, Smoke, was good, but he had Wayne Wang helping there. Then Auster produced Lulu on the Bridge by himself. Auster, a riddler of a writer most often placed in the postmodern category, untethered the script and let it float into the chimerical realm that his novels engage. Coincidence, randomness, the questioning of reality as a construct of words—all of this familiar (odd to call it that now) literary territory was hard to translate onto film.

Holding no grudges against a man for trying out different modes—finding it brave and admirable, in fact—I liked Martin Frost somewhat better than others did because I like meta-drama. Not every postmodern is dismissive of reality; some are just more interested in the complexities of the categories we so blithely move through day by day. “Your aporia is my mystery,” it might be said, and in Martin Frost, the mystery of artistic inspiration and construction is given a light approach.

In many ways, the tale itself is as old as culture: Cupid and Psyche; Orpheus and Eurydice. Martin (David Thewlis) is a writer who takes a break in the countryside at a friend’s cottage. He’s exhausted from three years of novel writing (which nearly put me off—I hate complaints about how “exhausting” writing is–a self-indulgent pose if ever there was one—I blame Byron).

But struck by an idea, he finds a typewriter and starts to work. The next morning, he wakes up next a woman named Claire (Irène Jacob). She claims to be a friend of the cottage owners, co-victim of a trick played on the two philosophs (she’s a philosophy student at Berkeley, studying Berkeley the philosopher; Auster must’ve wanted to use that one for a while). Claire’s read all of Martin’s work and is very interested in his current story.

In a short time, the two become lovers. But when Martin finds out Claire’s not who she says, she insists that he does in fact “know” her. Content that he’s found someone important, he soon finds that the more he writes, the more Claire’s health deteriorates. She urges him on, though in decline herself.

Martin’s realization of her true meaning, and his choice about what to do with it, sets up some interesting questions—not new, but worthy: where does this “tug on the artistic line” come from? How should it be recognized, tended, and nurtured? What’s an offense against it, amounting to blasphemy? And in true postmodern fashion, how much of this is real and how much just a construct? We hope, the film seems to suggest, that it’s real.

There’s no attempt to explain from whence Claire has come or why she’s come now—something of an ironic “breakdown” between the telling and the tale. The ending is also an over-complicated mess and the acting, kind of stagey (except for Jacob, still endearing all these years past Kieslowski’s use of her in The Double Life of Veronique and Red). So it’s likely that Auster will still be known for writing, not direction. But a treatment that allows a measure of respect for real gifts is at least a nice thing to see, especially when it’s born from a movement mostly known for denying the meaning of meaning.