Jonathan Nossiter's excellent Signs and Wonders is the second film released in the last month (the other is Wayne Wang's Center of the World) that explores the perils of globalization within an acutely human emotional landscape. In both cases, the arrogance of prosperity--man's tendency to infer from success that he has the power to control his fate--leads to tragedy with ramifications both intimate and universal.

At the center of Nossiter's world stands Alec (Stellan Skarsgård, great as always), a "voluntary American" living in Greece with his English wife, Marjorie (Charlotte Rampling, in a steely, strong, beautiful performance), and two loving children. Alec's success as a stock trader has given him the idea that he's a kind of perceptual master. He forever has the sense that life is showing him signs, and follows them with a credulity that seems benign at first, even charming. The signs tell him to end the affair he's been carrying on with Katherine (Deborah Kara Unger), a young woman in his office, and come clean to his wife, stopping at a pay phone on his way to an assignation to confess that he feels "full of it on every level." Marjorie takes the news with astonishing calm; she forgives her philandering husband as a mother forgives a child, and they proceed with their charmed life.

Everything's fine until Alec sees his former mistress on the slopes during a family ski vacation. Interpreting this as another sign (he's had her on the brain all along), he ditches his wife and kids right there and starts a new life with Katherine in America. As he professes his sense of "huge, absolute rightness" to her in the food court of a garish shopping mall (at the Acropolis Diner, no less), she admits that she engineered their seemingly chance encounter, that it wasn't fate at all. Alec is outraged, calls the whole thing off, and flies back to Athens to try to reconcile with his family. Though she welcomes his return for the sake of the kids, Marjorie is having none of his advances. Since their divorce, she's started seeing Andreas (Dimitris Katalifos), a Greek journalist, and has no desire to stop. This strikes Alec as only fair--"the way things should be"--as though a drama with a predetermined (happy) ending were simply playing itself out. Despite her strong, even-tempered assurances that it will never work, he remains steadfast in his courtship, assisted by his daughter, blind to the fact that the process makes him more and more ridiculous as the film progresses from droll human drama to dread-filled thriller. Events take a gradual but inexorable turn toward catastrophe as Katherine returns and Marjorie agrees to marry Andreas.

Nossiter visually underscores Alec's self-centered, self-justifying perceptions by surrounding his characters with innumerable signs, both literal and symbolic. The nimble camera presents Athens as a city in constant motion, teeming with American fast-food chains and multinational corporate billboards. These ubiquitous signifiers of global commerce suggest that meaning is necessarily arbitrary; we see in them what we want to see. When Alec stands on Andreas' balcony, confronting his ex-wife's new lover, he can't see the giant Volkswagen billboard overhead depicting a pregnant woman's naked belly. To the objective eye, it's a billboard, crass in its appropriation of human beauty to sell cars. But when Alec finally catches sight of it, it becomes a terrible prophecy of Andreas and Marjorie's happy future together. As a masterful punctuation, Nossiter frames Alec's discovery of the billboard with a second sign: a stick figure of a man walking down a staircase into a subway. Aside from subtly announcing Alec's descent into despair, the sign also drives home the film's crucial irony--that a man obsessed with signs can so dramatically fail (or refuse) to see the most obvious, glaring truths.

Significantly, both Signs and Wonders and Center of the World were shot on digital video, not as a cheap film substitute, but as a conscious aesthetic choice. In both films, the frank intimacy of the digital image strips the deeply human context of its metaphorical underpinning. The paradoxical result is that both the humanity and the metaphor are made less artful, and more resonant. Without taking this too far, it seems that the flat field of video enables skilled directors like Nossiter and Wang to bring both story and subtext to the literal foreground. If that's not an advance in the art of filmmaking, I don't know what is.