“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 | Reviews
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 →
‘Little Men,’ Looming Silences
This week I got to speak about Ira Sach’s wonderful new film “Little Men,” a micro-indie (that doesn’t look like a micro-indie) focusing on the friendship blooming between two thirteen-year-old boys as their parents battle over a Brooklyn retail space. I gave the lecture to the wonderful Long Island cinema club where I sometimes speak and from whom I always learn a lot whenever I do. The group is comprised of cinephiles who are mostly retired and emigrants from Brooklyn themselves. Their perspectives about the entwinement of art and life and how time can change seemingly cut-and-dry issues have made me cry more than once. Suffice it to say, they really grasped this film. Here is the bulk of what I discussed. Continue Reading →