Dutch angles: "All the Vermeers in New York"

Of all the filmmakers who came to prominence amid the US indie renaissance of the 1980s and 90s, Jon Jost has endured as arguably the most prolific and most independent, pursuing a series of signs and signifiers that have led him near-completely off-radar outside his homeland. (Which is one way to guarantee your independence, of course - remain truly marginal.) Revived this week on MUBI, Jost's 1990 curio All the Vermeers in New York meshes with certain early works by Spike Lee and Hal Hartley in suggesting the influence of Jean-Luc Godard on this American New Wave. (Jost had previously made the short Godard 1980, a record of an interview with the French filmmaker around the time of his comeback film Sauve qui peut (la vie).) Godard is everywhere here: in the pans over surfaces lined with texts, newspapers and photographs; in the film's visual puns and editing tics, its unexpected conjunctions of sound and image; in the sporadic deep dives into art history, taken after long run-ups through glorious gallery space. ATVINY is also, as my mum would say, slightly up itself - which, again, is not uncharacteristic of all things Godard, and requires some getting past. For a while, the onscreen activity suffers from a diffuse-to-split focus, introducing us almost at random to French actress Anna (Emmanuelle Chaulet, a graduate of Rohmer and Claire Denis films); her friend and flatmate Felicity (Grace Phillips), a gallerist; struggling artist Gordon (Gordon Joseph Weiss), who presents as an intriguing hybrid of Willem Dafoe and Denis Leary, but proves a red herring in the overall picture; and his polar opposite Mark (Stephen Lack), an artless financial trader. Everything clicks into place when Mark and Anna intersect while browsing the Vermeers in the Met - a terrific setpiece that takes in a clumsy-creepy meet-cute before concluding with the camera lined up behind Mark as he studies Anna as she studies the artist's "Portrait of a Woman". Immediately, you see why this film caught the eye of buyers and sales agents in a way few of Jost's 40-odd other works have: all of a sudden, we pass beyond Godard's droll cataloguing and into a more sensual, seductive, dangerous realm, an obsession worthy of Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Jost finds similarly eyecatching ways of framing this pair's haphazard courtship. Thirty years on, their date on the observation balcony of the World Trade Center has acquired a new poignancy: this could be a rough-edged outtake from the contemporaneous Sleepless in Seattle, anchored in a part of the world that is no longer there. Yet this romance feels secondary to Jost's very Godardian investigation into issues of value: he set out for New York, after a decade of Reaganomics, to think about what objects - and people - are truly worth. Why are dead artists valued over living ones? Can we put a price on love? Jost was ahead of the curve in spotting how relationships were becoming transactional, a sorry development that only intensified as dating apps became big business. New Amsterdam circa 1990 isn't that different, structurally, from the Old Amsterdam of Vermeer's time: it's a place of masters and servants. As stirring as the view from the Twin Towers may be, that date serves chiefly to delineate Mark's lofty perspective, and the disdain he feels for the little people - "ants", he calls them - going about their business below. All the Vermeers in New York has limitations as both a film and an inquiry. Of all the marginalised activity captured by this indie scene - a real rainbow coalition that spanned the inner-city dramas of Lee and John Singleton, the salty minimum-wage scrimping of Kevin Smith, and the sexual experimentation of Todd Haynes, Cheryl Dunye and Rose Troche - Jost's counts among the most highfalutin and, frankly, whitest. A typical scene finds Felicity - and pre-Wes Anderson, Jost and Whit Stillman would have been about the only filmmakers who might conceivably have named one of their characters Felicity - trying to extract herself from an offshore investment scam a relative has embroiled her in. Yet Jost's sympathies lie not with the masters of this universe, but those employed to prop them up (like the increasingly rattled Mark, whose job demands constant wealth generation; he's compared - via one bravura cut - with the stone pillars of a marbled lobby) and those, like Anna and Felicity, who are just struggling to make rent. A panoramic snapshot of a moment, this - and a reminder that not all New Yorkers of that moment were pinstriped devotees of Gordon Gekko and Donald Trump.

All the Vermeers in New York is available to stream via MUBI.