We live in a culture spoon-fed on explosions, stunts, car chases and various other shiny objects used to keep our short attention spans from drifting during the average 90-minute piece of dung commonly referred to as a “blockbuster.”

Independent films are about the only things keeping American film-making semi-legitimate. Unfortunately, they rarely draw huge audiences because they offer conversations and little action which is not cerebral or emotional.

Henry Jaglom has been a seminal influence in independent films since the early ’70s. He creates a unique brand of realistic, emotional dramas his way.

He controls the funding and the ultimate product. The “director’s cut” is what you get the first time you see it — not 10 years after the film becomes a cult classic.

Jaglom’s latest feature is “Deja Vu,” the story of a young American woman named Dana (Victoria Foyt) who meets an older French woman (Aviva Marks) while traveling in Jerusalem.

The French woman tells Dana the story of her one true love and how he left her at the end of World War II, never to return.

She gives Dana a pin which was given to her by her lover before she mysteriously disappears. On a whim, Dana travels to Paris in hopes of returning the pin to the woman, whose name she doesn’t even know.

She has a vision of a man from a jeweler’s shop in Paris. Dana goes to Dover, England, where she meets Sean (Stephen Dillane), and becomes inexplicably drawn to him.

Finding herself unable to go through with the affair, she leaves Dover and moves on to London to meet her fianc‚ and begin their “pre-honeymoon” at the house of a family friend.

Much to Dana’s surprise, she finds that Sean has been invited to spend the weekend in the same house. The coincidence is so astonishing that the idea of fate ordaining their meeting becomes a serious consideration.

Also spending the weekend is Skelly (Vanessa Redgrave) who encourages Dana to not give up an opportunity for love just because it is inconveniently timed. She argues that because you never know if you will be able to have another shot at love, each opportunity must be thoroughly exploited.

Jaglom likes to see reality brought to the screen; he eschews conventional Hollywood practices as plastic.

The problem is that in his attempt to make everything feel as real as possible, the movie comes off feeling too much like one of those “In Search of Bigfoot” documentaries from the ’70s, where “Hawaii Five-O’s” Dano just happens to show up in the middle of the Pacific Northwest wondering what is going on.

Though some of the scenes did have a genuine feel, as if we were watching these people secretly, most of the time it was less compelling than an episode of “The Real World.”

The problem is that this is a movie. It isn’t real, and the audience knows that. The performances felt wooden and completely false at times.

In real life, people don’t make up their lines as they go, and they don’t take a few seconds to find out what their gut is telling them to do before doing it; they just do it.

Real life is spontaneous, not ad- libbed.

The concept of “strange things happening when love is involved” is an intriguing one, and this story might have been more compelling had it not been for the actors getting in the way.

The best performance of the movie by far is that of Vanessa Redgrave, with her telling a story about being a little girl in the hospital during the war. The story was taken from Redgrave’s own life, and you will find yourself drawn in.

But the problem is that it has little to do with the film, and when things get back on track, you wish Redgrave had some more stories to tell.

Foyt was completely unsympathetic. Most of the time you won’t care if she ever finds love or not because she gives us no reason to care about her. She invokes no sympathy — quite the opposite. What is she doing even considering another man while she is on her honeymoon?

She is actually very un-likable, and any attempt to engender the interest of the audience in her future feels like the worst kind of assumption.

The ending is like a rejected “Night Gallery” script that is supposed to make us all ooh and ah. More likely, you will think, “This would be impressive … if this were Jaglom’s first movie.”

3 stars out of five

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs.