The alienated protagonist of Zack Winestine's independent feature ''States of Control'' is a woman who lives surrounded by metaphors, and looks suspiciously like a metaphor herself.

Lisa (Jennifer van Dyck) is a frustrated writer working as an administrator in a Lower Manhattan experimental theater. (Yes, life does often feel like a performance: an empty, meaningless representation of an ever deferred reality). She is married to an impotent artist. (Masculinity is indeed in crisis in these gender-twisting times. And what potency does art really possess in the post-post-modernist era?)

The film, which was made in 1997 and has since been waiting for its time to come, is technically very assured. Mr. Winestine is a former cinematographer whose filmography includes work as a camera assistant on Stanley Kubrick's ''The Shining,'' and his eye for composition is steady and solid. There is none of the herky-jerkiness of the currently official indie film style. The symphonic score by Richard Termini is impressive and adds all kinds of cosmic significance to Mr. Winestine's frequent, unmotivated cuts to clouds scudding across a blue sky.

After forcing herself to stay awake for 51 hours, Lisa sets out on a purely nihilistic -- or, at least, very vaguely motivated -- political mission, which leads to her ultimate separation from society. ''States of Control'' may be about Lisa's attempts to throw off the shackles of bourgeois ideology, but it offers no real sense of freedom and spontaneity of its own. In the end, Lisa's revolt seems as predictably programmatic, and as widely abstracted from observable human behavior, as the movie that contains her.

Excerpt from Dave Kehr's review at the NY Times located HERE.