HE'S THE 'PAL' IN 'PALINDROMES' SURE, DIRECTOR TODD SOLONDZ IS QUIRKY AND CONTROVERSIAL, BUT THAT'S WHAT MAKES HIM INTERESTING.

Byline: Evan Henerson Staff Writer

First goal: Stay alive. Second goal: Avoid humiliation.

Then make another movie, and repeat.

``I'm lucky to be able to do this and survive so far,'' says Todd Solondz, the writer-director of ``Palindromes.'' ``With everything I do, if I can survive the experience and avoid humiliation, then I'm really ahead of the game. The rest is gravy.''

Not exactly the loftiest of goals for a love-him-or-hate him auteur like Solondz, whose previous films ``Welcome to the Dollhouse,'' ``Happiness'' and Storytelling'' have examined persecuted (and persecuting) teenagers, nearly sympathetic pedophiles, and the depressed and miserable members of various family units who could put the dys in dysfunction.

Then again, popular or otherwise, Solondz knows his product.

``People say, 'Do you want to try to make a movie that would be more popular and that would have a bigger budget?' Well, I just don't think in those terms,'' he says. ``Because if any of my movies made $10 million, $20 million, $50 million at the box office, I'd be happy it made more money, but it wouldn't make me a happier person. As it is, the movies play in virtually all 50 states and around the world. So what's to complain about?

``Palindromes,'' opening in limited release Friday, is a kind of fairy tale, but certainly not one for the kids. Thirteen-year-old Aviva Victor's quest to become a mother is a modern-day odyssey that sends her careening into several facets of the debate over abortion.

Aviva is cousin to ``Dollhouse'' heroine Dawn Wiener, who, we learn, has committed suicide. Solondz hoped to bring ``Dollhouse's'' Heather Matarazzo back for a cameo in ``Palindromes'' but couldn't make it happen.

The odd, palindromic trick to the film is in its casting. Seven actors (six female, one male) of varying age and race play Aviva, trading off from scene to scene and never repeating. The character is 13 throughout the week-long series of events that the film portrays, but Aviva takes the form of an adolescent Latina, a fully grown black woman, a redhead with a mouthful of braces, and even, in one scene, Jennifer Jason Leigh.

``By using a little black girl to begin the movie - with Ellen Barkin as her mother - I needed to set off an alert to the audience that something's off here,'' says Solondz. ``Then you see she's a Latina, then she's a redhead. With the big black woman, she was Gulliver around the Lilliputians. And the movie has other references to fairy tales.''

Once a filmgoer can wrap his mind around the casting oddity, Solondz believes he can tap into the movie's moral questions over the consequences of taking action. Doctors who perform abortions are taking a position. So are the people who try to assassinate them. Aviva - a character supposed to be ``wholly sympathetic'' - encounters both.

``I think, on a profound human level, we all need to believe that everyone is fighting the good fight,'' says Solondz, ``that even if you are killing abortionists, you think you're saving millions of unborn babies. There is a logic at work. It's not just nut cases.

``Self-deception and narcissism are survival mechanisms, and I'm not out to tell you that your position is the right position or the wrong position, but to have you reassess and reevaluate in light of this drama that I've set in motion.''

``Palindromes'' is decidedly not intended to be a political film, says Solondz, who notes both sides could claim the film backs their viewpoint. ``I look for an audience with an open mind. That's all I can ask,'' he says. ``and a liberal mind certainly isn't the same thing as an open mind.

``Certainly I can say that a movie like mine shows up at film festivals all over the place, and at all of these film festivals and special screenings and so forth, there may be one conservative Christian that shows up. You have liberals saying this movie is pro-life and yet the Christians have me down on Web sites as being pro-abortion. I've managed to disenchant everybody.''

The words are delivered with the barest whiff of irony. Solondz, baby faced and dressed in bright colors, stammers and rarely makes eye contact with an interviewer. The director's manner comes across as more awkwardness than outright discomfort.

When they made the rounds of the festival circuit promoting ``Palindromes,'' Ellen Barkin, who plays Aviva's mother, Joyce, said that she - not Solondz - was the person who routinely came off as ``the odd one.'' ``Palindromes'' played the New York, Telluride and Venice film festivals, while Solondz's previous movies have enjoyed acclaim at Sundance and Cannes.

And whether he is odd, popular or otherwise, Barkin contends she has never worked with a better director or taken more pride in a project.

``It just kind of hit everything at the top of the mountain for me,'' says Barkin, ``and I could not have done it without Todd. He is so gentle, so tender, so humane and so super-sensitive, and he intuits so quickly. He's a very sensitive man, and I think he makes very sensitive movies.''

Sensitive? A man in whose films characters systematically and profanely tear each other to shreds?

Absolutely, says Barkin.

``That scene in 'Happiness' where the fabulous Dylan Baker is sitting on the couch with his son and your heart is breaking for him,'' says Barkin. ``Or in this movie when Stephen Guirgis bangs his head against the wall and says, 'How many more times can I be born again!' and you heart just breaks for him. I don't know how you accomplish that as a director.''

Evan Henerson, [phone]

evan.henerson(at)dailynews.com

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``He's a very sensitive man, and I think he makes very sensitive movies,'' says ``Palindrome'' co-star Ellen Barkin of the film's director, Todd Solondz.

David Sprague/Staff Photographer