“The Light Between Oceans” is not the type of film that reviewers are inclined to love. Based on M.L. Stedman’s international bestseller, it is less a drama than it is a melodrama, which is currently one of film’s least fashionable genres. That’s a shame in my book, for I’m a big believer that cinema – and for that matter historical fiction – is an ideal forum for those sweeping, unruly emotions that modern life does not otherwise permit; witness the glory of Todd Haynes and Pedro Almodovar movies. Improbably beautiful and improbably anguished, “The Light Between Oceans” offers exactly that experience. Continue Reading →
Archive | Book Matters
The Toils of ‘Fatima’
“Fatima” begins slowly and deliberately, and proceeds that way for its entire seventy-eight minutes, like a mother straightening her child’s room. This is appropriate, for it is about an Algerian cleaning woman struggling to raise her two teenage daughters in Lyon, France. The film is a loose adaptation of Priere a la lune (Prayer to the Moon), a short collection of poems and other writings by Fatima Elayoubi, a North African woman who emigrated to France and taught herself the language. Fatima’s onscreen stand-in is played by the nonprofessional actor Soria Zeroual, who really worked as a cleaning woman until being cast in this film.
At times, Zeroual’s lack of acting experience is all too evident – her high, trailing voice can grate; her motions and features can seem frozen – but soon enough you see what director Philippe Faucon saw in her: an unadulterated steadiness that shores her children – and this film – in the face of all adversity. With her veiled head, stricken expression, and broken French, Fatima encounters micro – and macro – aggression daily, yet remains undeterred as she spends long hours cleaning a local factory and the houses of unhappy, wealthy women. Nothing can sway her from the goal of supporting Nesrine (Zita Hanrot), her eighteen-year-old daughter in medical school, and Souad (Kenza Noah Aiche), her fifteen-year-old daughter who is as surly with her mother as she is with her schoolmates and teachers. Continue Reading →
Austen Auteurs
“Love & Friendship,” Whit Stillman’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, is one of the best films of 2016 so far. This is surprising not merely because Lady Susan, an epistolary novel that favors its wicked protagonist at the expense of its subsidiary characters, is easily Austen’s least-beloved book. It is also surprising because so few Austen adaptations live up to their source material. There is Ang Lee’s 1995 “Sense and Sensibility,” which, penned by Emma Thompson, boasts a delightful buoyancy, and Patricia Rozema’s appropriately salty “Mansfield Park” (1999). There is the 1995 BBC miniseries “Pride and Prejudice,” which launched Colin Firth as the dreamiest Darcy on both sides of the Pond. But for every Austen adaptation success story, there’s a film like the unfortunate “Emma” (1996), in which Gwyneth Paltrow simpers over cups of tea for two hours, or, worse, the 2005 production of “Pride and Prejudice,” in which Keira Knightley dimples and bats her lashes as Elizabeth Bennet.
No decent portrayal of Elizabeth Bennet entails dimples.
Yet given the general decline of Western civilization in both the U.K. and the U.S., I believe we need film adaptations of Austen’s work more than ever – films that uphold her wit, etiquette, and ethics. We just need good adaptations that match the right director to the material.
Here are some dream teams sure to deliver more truth than treacle. Continue Reading →