Second City Tzivi

Tzivi review La Rafle… with a look back at Sarah’s Key

July 16, 1942: Early in the morning, French gendarmes start banging on the doors of thousands of Jewish Parisians, and order them to pack one suitcase of personal effects each plus enough food for two days. They are then loaded onto trucks and herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a sports stadium near the Eiffel Tower known colloquially as the “Vél d’Hiv.”

After enduring several days of stifling heat, with poor sanitation and limited fresh water, they are packed off to small regional internment camps outside Paris, and soon after, they are sent on to Auschwitz, where almost all of them are immediately gassed upon arrival.

This black day in history is now known in French as “La Rafle” (in English, “The Vél d’Hiv Round Up“), and if some of this already sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because you either read Tatiana de Rosnay’s best-selling novel Sarah’s Key (published in 2007), or saw the film adaptation released in 2011 (staring Kristin Scott Thomas as an American journalist named “Julia” who is covering French plans to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv Round Up), or both.

Regular readers might recall that I was none too fond of Sarah’s Key. In my August 2011 JUF News column, I wrote: “Without giving away the ending, let me just say that while the scenes set in 1942 are urgent and compelling, I couldn’t find the adult Sarah in the girl so poignantly played by young Melusine Mayance… These documented historical facts, still so raw and painful, deserve a better framing story.”

After I saw the film, I read the novel (that’s the rule I follow as a film critic), and I did like the novel more, but only a little. For one thing, the melodramatic scene in which Sarah commits suicide was definitely added by director Gilles Paquet-Brenner and his co-screenwriter Serge Joncour; the fate of the novel’s adult Sarah is much more ambiguous. But still, comparing Sarah’s ordeal with Julia’s domestic travails (which run along parallel lines in both the novel and the film), made me queasy.

So from my POV, it is all to the good that writer/director Rose Bosch keeps La Rafle anchored in the horrific events of 1942, and feels no need to “engage our sympathies” further by adding a contemporary heroine.

The narrative arc of La Rafle follows two characters, both drawn from life. The first is “Joseph Weissman;” the second is “Annette Monoud.” Joseph, nicknamed “Jo,” is the child of Jews from Poland. Annette Monoud is a French nurse and the daughter of a Protestant minister. We follow them separately for the first third of La Rafle, then their stories forever entwine when they meet in the Vél d’Hiv in the middle of the film.

When we first see him onscreen, Jo (played by Hugo Leverdez) is a happy kid living in a working class neighborhood with his parents and two older sisters. His father “Shmuel” (Gad Elmaleh) is a laborer with left-wing political views. His mother “Sura” (Raphäelle Agogué), who takes in ironing to help the family finances, is more religious. These are hard-working people who treasure their lives in France.

Sura, who sprinkles her clumsy French with Yiddish, has especially bitter memories of life in Lublin. Her consolation is that her children were all born in France, so whatever might happen to her, they are French citizens and therefore they are safe. As the round-up begins, Shmuel even asserts himself with the gendarmes, demanding respect as someone who fought for France in World War I. It doesn’t matter. From the perspective of the Vichy Government, they are all just Jews… full stop.

The real Annette Monod came from a prominent French family. Film geeks will love the fact that one of her distant cousins is French director Jean-Luc Godard. Humanitarians will appreciate her close genealogical connection to Jean-Paul Sartre’s mother Marie Louise Schweitzer (related on her father’s side to Nobel Prize-winner Albert Schweitzer). None of this deep background (Thank you, Google!) is presented in the film, of course, but the Annette we meet onscreen does seem to possess a rare inner fortitude, as well as the firm conviction that she has the right, as a French citizen, to protest the horrendous treatment of her Jewish countrymen at the highest levels.

This appears to have been the real woman (someone who fought for years against the death penalty and ended her days working for Amnesty International); “Annette Monod” isn’t just a screenwriter’s convenience. (Note that the press kit claims “Today she is one of The Righteous Among The Nations…honored by Israel,” but I was not able to verify this on the Yad Vashem website.)

French actress Melanie Laurent (best-known to American audiences for the Jewish characters she has played in Beginners, Inglorious Basterds, and Le Concert) is luminous as the moral center of La Rafle. True, I would have excised her close-ups with young Nono’s teddy bear, but that is a really tiny quibble. For the most part, filmmaker Rose Bosch keeps our eyes focused on the abyss without clouding them with tears. Brava!

La Rafle opens tomorrow (January 18) at the Gene Siskel Film Center on State Street. For additional dates, times, and tickets, visit their website.

To learn more about La Rafle’s historical background, visit the Menemsha Films website.

For more pix from La Rafle, visit my Pinterest page.

Inside the Vel d’Hiv. Photos courtesy of Menemsha Films.

Jan Lisa Huttner (1/17/13)–Special for JUF Online.

Posted by JUF on 1/17/13.

Tzivi reviews The Guilt Trip

Welcome to New Jersey! When “Andy Brewster” (Seth Rogen) arrives at Newark Airport, his mother “Joyce” (Barbra Streisand) is there to greet him. But although Joyce wears a mile-wide smile, every inch of her tremulous body signals that visits from Andy are few and far between. And thus begins a lovely new film from Anne Fletcher in which two people in one of mankind’s most intense dyadic relationships learn to treasure each other anew as separate and unique individuals.

There are good reasons why the “road trip” is such a popular movie genre. As the principals travel from Point A to Point B, filmmakers behind the scenes have a constant supply of raw energy at the ready (new scenery, zany characters, clever plot twists). In the right hands, each stop along the way becomes another jewel in a bracelet audiences can close at the end with a satisfying click of the clasp: “The circle of life.”

In The Guilt Trip, Andy invites Joyce to join him on a cross-country drive so he can pitch to potential distributors like Kmart, Costco, and the Home Shopping Network before returning home to LA. Andy is an organic chemist who has invented a good product (a biodegradable, child-safe and eco-friendly cleaning solution), but he’s not much of a salesman. Faced with the prospect of all those strange faces, he suddenly wants his Mommy.

I don’t think we ever know exactly where they start from (although there is one scene explicitly set in Montclair), but suffice it to say that while Joyce lives in a comfortable suburban home, she will never meet up with Carmela Soprano in the neighborhood grocery store. Joyce, who has been a widow for decades, lives a quiet life with her friends and her books and her television shows. She spends her time waiting for calls from Andy, who never really needs to call her because she’s always calling him. So Joyce is stunned when Andy asks her to come along, but she’s immediately on board.

I won’t reveal any of the details of their various stops in Tennessee, Texas, Nevada, and California except to say they’re tender and endearing, engineered to allow both characters to know more about themselves as well as each other by the time they finally part at the San Francisco airport. Yes, there is a well-earned happy ending prompting both smiles and sniffles.

Rogen is best known for his roles in raunchy Judd Apatow films like Knocked Up and Funny People, but now that he’s famous he’s also taken roles in small Indies like this year’s heart-wrenching Take This Waltz, in which he plays Michelle Williams’ Jewish husband “Lou.” Is Andy Brewster Jewish? It’s hard to imagine Barbra Streisand playing anyone who isn’t Jewish, but except for one murmured Yiddish endearment (“tateleh”), the Brewsters, while implicitly Jewish, are never explicitly so. Let’s just say it’s a given.

Streisand, playing her first lead role in decades, is a joy to watch on screen. (She had funny bits as Ben Stiller’s mom “Roz Focker” in Meet the Fockers and Little Fockers, but her last starring role was “Rose Morgan” in The Mirror Has Two Faces way back in 1996!) This character, “Joyce Brewster,” couldn’t be more different from the real Barbra Streisand, and yet she’s genuine and totally believable (enough so that her intrusive kvetching is sometimes as irritating to the audience as it is to Andy). Her subtle delivery in the penultimate scene, set high on a hilltop in one of San Francisco’s “Painted Ladies,” is a lovely little grace note.

Screenwriter Dan Fogelman is definitely Jewish and according to the buzz, he based this story on a real road trip he once took with his own mother (now deceased). If so, this may explain the film’s main flaw which is that we don’t really know enough about Joyce’s backstory. But director Anne Fletcher compensates for this by making Joyce totally vivid in each moment on screen, and so, in the end, I really didn’t care much about what she’d really been doing all those years before getting into her car to drive to Newark Airport.

Fletcher began her career as a dancer and made her movie breakthrough as a choreographer in films like Hairspray, but now she’s turned to directing, and she’s already created two films that have been critical bombs but commercial successes. Like The Guilt Trip, Fletcher’s earlier films 27 Dresses and The Proposal are more complex and therefore more rewarding than they appear to be. Dismissed as “RomComs” (Romantic Comedies), both 27 Dresses and The Proposal were really about characters approaching 30 who can’t quite grow up until they recognize their parents as people (flaws and all). Clearly The Guilt Trip is a natural addition to this body of work.

I expect The Guilt Trip to get a lot of negative reviews, but don’t let that stop you. It’s sweet and life-affirming and in this season of hype and bluster, you can do a whole lot worse at your local multiplex.

Babs as “Joyce.” Photo clipped from Rotten Tomatoes.

Posted by JUF Online on 12/19/12.

Tzivi reviews Wagner & Me

In his autobiography The Fry Chronicles, British actor Stephen Fry tells us about the first time he experienced Richard Wagner’s four-part Der Ring des Nibelungen. He was a Cambridge University undergraduate, and a friend took him to a Royal Opera House production in London.

“Monday Das Rheingold, Tuesday Die Walküre, Wednesday off, Thursday Siegfried, Friday off and Saturday, Götterdämmerung. A week of Valkyries and Niebelungs and Gods and Heroes and Norns and Giants… It gets into your blood… All Wagnerians know the film that descends over the eyes of those to whom they talk about their obsession, so I will say no more save to point out what is perhaps obvious, that it was a shattering experience and a life-changingly important week for me.”

Although you may not recognize the name Stephen Fry, I assure you, you have all seen this veteran British character actor many times in films such as A Fish Called Wanda (1988), Gosford Park (2001), V for Vendetta (2005), and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011). In 1997, he starred as Oscar Wilde in the biopic Wilde (with Jude Law and Vanessa Redgrave), and in 2013, he will be in multiplexes everywhere in The Hobbit.

But what you may not know, based on his look as well as his name, is that Fry is Jewish. His maternal grandparents came to England from a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that is now Slovakia, and many of his mother’s relatives died in Auschwitz.

So the decision to declare himself Richard Wagner’s greatest cinematic advocate almost thirty years after attending that first London production, comes with the self-conscious knowledge that “he” will always be in the background; “he,” Adolf Hitler, also a well-known and very passionate Wagnerian.

And now a bit about myself before I go on: Of course I know, just as Fry knows, that many Jewish people with broad cultural taste and deep appreciation for all forms of art, music and literature will not partake of Wagner in any form because of “him.” In Israel, Wagner’s music is still banned from concert stages although it is sometimes played now on the radio.

A good synopsis of all this was recently provided by The New Yorker‘s music critic Alex Ross, who is currently working on a book called Wagnerism: Art in the Shadow of Music. Ross concludeshis column with this ironic quote from Theodore Herzl: “My only recreation [while writing The Jewish State] was listening to Wagner’s music in the evening.”

My own first expose to Wagner was a college course on the 19^th Century which included his Tristan and Isolde. Like Fry, I was hooked. A few years later, just out of graduate school, I made one of my most expensive purchases to date: two tickets to see Tristan and Isolde at Lyric Opera. I saw my first complete Ring Cycle at the Lyric a few years after that, and my husband and I went again the next time the Lyric offered it. Then, last year, we went to the Met simulcasts at our local multiplex. One Tristan and three Rings, that’s over fifty hours of performance time, but compared to Fry, I am a novice!

In Wagner & Me, Fry and director Patrick McGrady travel around Europe visiting sites such as the Villa Wesendonck in Switzerland and the Neuschwanstein Schloss in Bavaria that were critical to Wagner’s long gestation process. (The Ring Cycle took approximately 25 years to complete.)

They stage their grand finale in Bayreuth, Germany, where Wagner had an opera house built to his exact specifications for the premiere of The Ring Cycle on August 13, 1876. Wagnerites still flock here every year for the annual Bayreuth Festival (now run under the demanding eyes of two of Wagner’s great-granddaughters, Eva Wagner-Pasquier and Katharina Wagner).

Simultaneously, they plot Hitler’s rise and fall, with scenes of “him” waving to adoring crowds from the balcony of the Festspielhaus Bayreuth in 1938. Fry approaches this inflammatory image with care, adroitly explaining why it does not impact his own love for Wagner’s Ring Cycle. McGrady, who also directed the BBC’s BAFTA-nominated documentary Stephen Fry & the Gutenberg Press, knows how to let Fry be Fry, and I sincerely believe Jews everywhere are well-served by the humanistic lessons taught by this ebullient raconteur.

Completed and distributed in Europe in 2010, Wagner and Me was recently acquired by First Run Features and will play at selected art houses all across the United States in 2013. Chicago gets a sneak peek at the Gene Siskel Film Center, with a full week of screenings from Nov 30 through Dec 6. For schedule information, visit: www.SiskelFilmCenter.org.

The Bayreuth Festival Hall seen from Fry’s POV.

Posted by JUF Online on 11/27/12.

Tzivi reviews Simon and the Oaks

Lisa Ohlin’s new film Simon and the Oaks is about the choices we sometimes make when we are young, choices that we make without realizing they are choices, choices that turn out to determine the future.

In this case the fateful choice is made by a boy named “Simon” (Jonatan S. Wächter) on his very first day at a new school. Simon is the bookish child of a robust and physically powerfully man named “Erik” (Stefan Gödicke) who worries that others might call his son a wimp. So he forces boxing lessons on a reluctant boy who flees as soon as he can. But once at school, Simon sees students bullying another boy and bam! A boy who could never defend himself finds the inner strength to fight for another.

Grateful “Isak” (Karl Martin Eriksson) immediately becomes Simon’s constant companion. These boys come from families that are polar opposities: Simon’s family is rural, working class, and Protestant; Isak’s family is urban, upper middle class and Jewish. But while cultural differences sometimes create tension, there are no doctrinal religious barriers blocking empathy. Furthermore Erik is a committed Socialist and therefore fervently anti-Nazi, so Simon has no patience with the anti-Semitic chatter of wealthier classmates.

The story opens in the summer of 1939 when what will become World War II is already on the horizon, soon to become a daily nightmare. Isak’s father “Ruben” (Jan Josef Liefers) had fled Berlin early, taking sufficent resources to set himself up in Gothenburg, Sweden (where the bulk of the story takes place). Isak and his mother came later, already scared by their traumatic experiences under Nazi boots.

Forget that you know what will happen to most German Jews and what will not happen to most Swedish Jews. One of the strengths of Simon and the Oaks is its ability to capture the terror of the times for all those most impacted. Finally the war is over and a post-war economic boom begins in Sweden. But mutual interdependence during the war years has made these two families so close that their fates are forever intertwined.

Now adults, Simon (Bill Skarsgård) and Isak (Karl Linnertorp) pursue their chosen professions and various girls enter the mix. And always holding everyone together is Simon’s mother “Karin” (Helen Sjöholm) a seemingly ordinary woman with a ferocious will. Despite Erik’s reservations, Karin makes a place in her home for Isak, and so, although the boys are friends in the film’s first hour, in the second hour, they relate to each other more as brothers.

Simon and the Oaks is a sweeping historical epic filled with rich character detail and deeply inhabited performances. Although the person at the center is clearly Simon (first as a boy and then as a young man), all of the major characters have believable narrative arcs, and none are short-changed. Screenwriter Marnie Blok has distilled the essence of Marianne Fredriksson’s beloved source novel (very long and very dense) without turning anyone from three dimensions into two.

Many talented women also play small but significant supporting roles, including Isak’s mother, Simon’s aunt, and Ruben’s neice (an Auschwitz survivor). Each actress makes a contribtion that resonates.

With a budget of $7.5 million, Simon and the Oaks is one of the most expensive feature films ever produced in Sweden, and almost none of it has been wasted on explosions, chases or other tedious “special” effects. The cinematography is luminous with natural light and furtive shadows; the art direction, set direction, and costume design are precise and attentive; and the soundtrack is filled with luscious musical snippets (often from The Symphony Fantastique by Hector Berlioz) which actually play a critical role in the plot.

Simon and the Oaks received 13 nominations recently for Guldbagge Awards from the Swedish Film Institute (aka the “Swedish Oscars”) including Best Picture and Best Director, and I’m sure it deserved every one of them. It is the kind of “old fashioned” film rarely seen in American multiplexes these days, the kind of film I have always loved and always welcome. Brava, Lisa Ohlin!

Bill Skarsgård (left) as “Simon” visits a Jewish cemetery with “Ruben” (Jan Josef Liefers).

Simon and the Oaks opens in Metro Chicago at the Landmark Century Center in Lincoln Park and the Landmark Renaissance Place in Highland Park on Oct 19.

Posted by JUF Online on 10/19/12.

From Tzivi’s Cinema Spotlight for October 2012

Last night I saw a screening of Julia Loktev’s new film The Loneliest Planet at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. (Turns out I can just hop on the Q Train in Brooklyn and I’m there in under an hour!)

I wrote a rave review of Loktev’s first film Day Night Day Night in my JUF News report on the 42^nd annual Chicago International Film Festival way back in 2006, and The Loneliest Planet is even better.

Although there is no obvious Jewish content, The Loneliest Planet stars Israeli actress Hani Furstenberg (best-known for her excellent supporting roles in Campfire and Yossi and Jagger), and it’s wonderful to see Furstenberg spread her wings in the center of this searing narrative.

Does the character of “Nica” have to be Jewish? Probably not. But as created by Loktev and embodied by Furstenberg, I am completely convinced that she is. Bravi, Banot!

The Loneliest Planet opens in New York and LA on Oct 26, and at the Music Box Theatre in Andersonville on Nov 2.

Click HERE to read my full review of The Loneliest Planet for WomenArts.

Hani Furstenberg (right) as “Nica.”

Posted by JUF Online on 10/19/12.