Day
6 - September 6 Bad
Weather, Great Movies, Beautiful Music
The
weather was rotten today in Deauville but the movies couldn't have
been better.
Maggie
Greenwald's Songcatcher celebrates folk music and folk arts
through the adventures of a somewhat stern musicologist, Doctor
Lily Penleric (a suitably imperious Janet McTeer) who drags a Victrola
and Edison wax cylinders up a remote mountain in Appalachia, circa
1907, to record the distinctive local ditties. The outside world
assumes that mountain folk are inbred and backward, but the movie
gently demonstrates there's often a gulf between book learning and
common sense, not to mention a world of difference between being
stupid and simply being poor. The characters are vividly drawn and
the twists and turns in this unconventional tale add up to a satisfying
journey to another place and time.
The second film in competition today, Raymond De Felitta's Two
Famly House is an unalloyed pleasure. Set on Staten Island in
1956, it's a resonant story of ordinary people taking rather extraordinary
steps, told by a very well informed narrator. The writer-director
based his refreshingly human tale on a true incident from his own
family's history. De Felitta brought his first feature Cafe Society
to Deauville in 1995 and has definitely delivered on the promise
of that quirky low budget effort, also based on true incidents.
Deauville
audiences remained on the East Coast in the mid-fifties with Barry
Levinson's richly detailed bittersweet comedy Liberty Heights,
which covers the 12 months betwen Jewish New Year in late October
of 1954 and Jewish New Year in 1955. The fourth of the writer-director's
18 films to take place in his native Baltimore ("It's the fourth
film in his Baltimore trilogy," remarked a math-impaired friend
of mine) it's a just about perfect portrait of a middle class Jewish
family on the cusp of enormous changes. One son falls for a lovely
black girl in his freshly integrated high school and the other is
taken with a picture perfect shiksa ice queen. Meanwhile, their
father is supplementing his falling income from a burlesk house
with a numbers racket that no longer adds up when one tricky customer
gets very lucky. The performances are splendid, the milieu spot-on.
The
day conluded with a tribute to Hollywood Musicals with distinguished
guests Leslie Caron, Joel Grey and Mickey Rooney. Grey serenaded
the capacity crowd with the trilingual signature tune from Cabaret
after which the perfectly bilingual Caron told the crowd she's been
on the stage for most of her life and "Even had the unique luck
one night to dance with both Nureyev and Barishnikof on the same
stage." Rooney and his wife, a gifted belter in her own right, did
a comic duet on "You Made Me Love You" and "Let's Call the Whole
Thing Off."
"Judy Garland," said Rooney, "was one of the greatest perfomers
we ever had. She would've loved this place."
Maggie
Greenwald's Songcatcher celebrates folk music and folk arts
through the adventures of a somewhat stern musicologist, Doctor
Lily Penleric (a suitably imperious Janet McTeer) who drags a Victrola
and Edison wax cylinders up a remote mountain in Appalachia, circa
1907, to record the distinctive local ditties. The outside world
assumes that mountain folk are inbred and backward, but the movie
gently demonstrates there's often a gulf between book learning and
common sense, not to mention a world of difference between being
stupid and simply being poor. The characters are vividly drawn and
the twists and turns in this unconventional tale add up to a satisfying
journey to another place and time.
Deauville
audiences remained on the East Coast in the mid-fifties with Barry
Levinson's richly detailed bittersweet comedy Liberty Heights,
which covers the 12 months betwen Jewish New Year in late October
of 1954 and Jewish New Year in 1955. The fourth of the writer-director's
18 films to take place in his native Baltimore ("It's the fourth
film in his Baltimore trilogy," remarked a math-impaired friend
of mine) it's a just about perfect portrait of a middle class Jewish
family on the cusp of enormous changes. One son falls for a lovely
black girl in his freshly integrated high school and the other is
taken with a picture perfect shiksa ice queen. Meanwhile, their
father is supplementing his falling income from a burlesk house
with a numbers racket that no longer adds up when one tricky customer
gets very lucky. The performances are splendid, the milieu spot-on.
The
day conluded with a tribute to Hollywood Musicals with distinguished
guests Leslie Caron, Joel Grey and Mickey Rooney. Grey serenaded
the capacity crowd with the trilingual signature tune from Cabaret
after which the perfectly bilingual Caron told the crowd she's been
on the stage for most of her life and "Even had the unique luck
one night to dance with both Nureyev and Barishnikof on the same
stage." Rooney and his wife, a gifted belter in her own right, did
a comic duet on "You Made Me Love You" and "Let's Call the Whole
Thing Off."