I am watching a movie on a small television screen. Despite seeing no titles, somehow I know that it is called Alexanderplatz: Berlin Blue, a sequel to Berlin Alexanderplatz, though I have neither read the Döblin book nor watched the Fassbinder miniseries. I am merely engrossed in the scene taking place: Willem Dafoe in a bleak-grey square in Germany—Nazis have just shot his friend and he is yelling something, trying to make his way to the scene of the shooting, but the crowd is holding him back and yet simultaneously trying to keep its distance from him as none of them wish to have attention drawn to themselves. Dafoe’s character slowly gains control of himself, the camera lingers dramatically on his emotional but now resigned face, then it fades to another scene:

Leonardo DiCaprio is eating in a dimly lit diner whereabouts unknown though his over-eager waitress speaks with a Southern American accent. As she asks him for the third time in less than a minute if he needs anything else—there appear to be no other customers dining at the moment—he calmly holds up his hand. Finally, she walks away. As DiCaprio’s character takes a long drink from his orange juice, his voice is heard on the soundtrack—not his inner thoughts but something he has said or is about to say in this very diner. I marvel at the director’s choice in disconnecting the film’s audio and visual elements here. The waitress is back and her mouth is moving, but we do not hear her. Instead, we continue to hear DiCaprio’s voice. The musical score is also doing strange things: it keeps getting stuck, stopping for a moment, then repeating itself. It is not a problem with the device, however. I can tell that the movie was made this way intentionally. For one thing, DiCaprio’s voice continues on with no glitches. But now the score has mostly righted itself, a melancholy accompaniment to the waitress walking away again even while her voice continues to ask him unbearably unnecessary questions on the soundtrack. In this moment, the disconnected audio and visuals strike me as profound (an homage to Alain Resnais?): two human beings engaging politely in basic communication and successfully and civilly completing their societal obligations as waitress and customer but utterly failing to connect to one another beyond this, each of them out of sync with their surroundings, the tension that often results from even the most mundane of interactions. Then DiCaprio’s character gets up, leaves the diner, and the scene is over.