Terry Zwigoff's Ghost World (2002)

Ghost World is a world where smartphones have yet to be totally everywhere, but where retro is the new cool: cafés replicate the fifties, record players play vinyl, etc. Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) and Enid (Thora Birch) have graduated and, like, aren't too certain about the way their futures are gonna pan out, but hey, they don't want anything to do with dorks – although these are two cool girls surrounded by an uncool world. For the moment, though, Enid has to attend remedial art school, where the tutor was moulded by a (non-existent in real life) experimental film called 'Mirror, Father, Mirror', which could well be a piss-take of Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man.

Then – and again this was made in 2002 so people still wrote small ads, like in the lonely hearts columns of newspapers – they notice one guy's ad (in fact from Seymour (Steve Buscemi), in his mid-forties). What a dork, and Enid writes this word in her diary. But then she starts to feel sorry for him as they've fixed him up with a totally non-existent date. So then they follow him, and Enid manages to talk to him at work: he sells secondhand records, and she even buys a blues record from him, one of the tracks of which she totally likes.

In fact she even sees him as cool. But then, of course, coolness can easily revert to uncoolness, and back again and back again, forever. But, like, Seymour's flat is so totally retro, he's even got an original(!) hook-up phone like you see in stone-age movies, and fifteen hundred 78s. Enid must fix him up with a girlfriend. But it's hard to talk about music to a girl when you know your subject inside out but she definitely doesn't. Yeah, any Aspie would be able to recognise that Seymour's on the spectrum.

But something of the Aspie gene dwells in Enid too. OK, you'd expect her not to relate to her father, but not to her best friend Rebecca. An old man, Norman, always sits on a bench on the sidewalk, waiting for a bus that'll never come because the service has been discontinued on this road. And yet we see Norman board an empty out-of-service one going – well, who knows? Ghost Town? So Enid decides to sit on the bench too, and another empty out-of-service bus pulls up for her. Un jour nous prendrons des trains qui partent. Totally weird, loved it.