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Broken
Bonds
 One
is a young Russian girl whose father moves to America in 1927
to seek a better life for his family. The other is a Hungarian
infant whose parents and older sister flee to the United States
in 1950 to evade totalitarian rule. These characters have
different stories, but their fates are the same: They spend
years separated from their families, and are so haunted by
feelings of abandonment that they are barely able to form
identities. Their victimization is a poignant echo of the
oppression that ran rampant in Eastern Europe in the 20th
century.
The Russian girl is the protagonist of The Man Who Cried
(Universal), a bloodless drama featuring a quartet of top
indie-film stars, and the Hungarian infant is the heart of
An American Rhapsody (Paramount), an elegant picture
based on its director’s real-life experiences. The films,
which just hit video after bombing in theaters, treat similar
stories differently: The intoxicating visuals of The Man
Who Cried are thwarted by narrative pretensions, whereas
An American Rhapsody succeeds by evading pretension
in every possible way.
The
Man Who Cried is the latest picture from British director
Sally Potter, best known for the gender-bending Orlando.
The movie’s impressive attributes include an insinuating score
performed by the Kronos Quartet and glossy cinematography
by Sacha Vierny, but its biggest selling point is its cast:
Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro, Johnny Depp.
The picture starts promisingly enough, with nearly silent
vignettes depicting the heroine’s childhood in Russia and
her desperate emigration to England. But as soon as the movie
shifts to the heroine as an adult, the momentum drains out
of the story.
Suzie (Ricci) gets a job singing alongside another Russian-born
chorine (Blanchett) in a British opera company that just recruited
an egomaniacal Italian singer (Turturro) to star in several
productions. So begins a convoluted romantic entanglement
in which Suzie’s friend seduces the Italian, while Suzie courts
a soulful gypsy (Depp). Potter’s storytelling is vague and
unfocused, and Ricci’s somnambulant performance adds to the
sluggishness of the piece. Blanchett’s expat flamboyance is
credible, and Turturro’s bitchiness is amusing, but the elements
never gel. By the time Suzie tries to reconnect with her long-lost
dad, the drama of her family separation has been insurmountably
diluted.
Peculiarly, the heroine of An American Rhapsody also
is named Suzie. After an effective black-and-white prologue
depicting her parents’ flight from Hungary, during which the
baby is left behind out of fear that her cries might alert
border guards to the family’s illegal crossing, the movie
shifts into a dreamy passage depicting the young girl’s idyllic
life with foster parents in the Hungarian countryside. Perhaps
because writer-director Eva Gardos based the story on her
own life, the details of the Hungarian scenes have the luminous
magic of childhood memories. So when the 6-year-old girl is
put on a U.S.-bound plane for a reunion with her parents,
her separation from her Hungarian guardians packs an emotional
punch.
Once the child arrives in America, Gardos stages a compelling
sequence in which Suzie mistakes her new family for friendly
hosts, believing herself to be on vacation. It’s wrenching
to watch Suzie’s parents (Tony Goldwyn and Nastassja Kinski)
try to make their own child love them, and it’s painful to
see how the simple tensions between Suzie and her Americanized
older sister fester. While Gardos underlines the joys of living
in a free society, she slyly points to the crassness of America
in the 1950s, which accentuates why Suzie misses the rustic
pleasures of her lost home.
About an hour into the movie, Ghost World’s Scarlett
Johansson takes over the Suzie role to depict how teen angst
leads the rebellious Suzie to finagle a ticket back to Hungary.
While Johannson nails Suzie’s put-upon quality, she’s flat
when delivering unironic lines, so much of the heavy lifting
in dramatic scenes is done by Kinski, who acquits herself
nicely. The best work of these two actors combines with Gardos’
disciplined touch and keeps An American Rhapsody from
ever devolving into a soap opera; the director never loses
touch with the story she’s trying to tell, so every scene
builds on the one that came before and sets the stage for
the next one.
The cumulative effect of this meticulous process is felt when
15-year-old Suzie returns to Hungary, a visit that leads to
several life-changing discoveries. Whereas The Man Who
Cried wastes its potential on excessive visuals and superfluous
subplots, An American Rhapsody sings a moving ballad
to those cleaved from their homes by the vagaries of geopolitical
tumult.
—Peter
Hanson
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