Dear Stan,
I loved your perceptive review of "The Illusionist". (see Stan's Movie Blog.) I was enthralled by this unusual movie when I saw it in the cinema and I have just received my DVD from Amazon.co.uk - hot from its much delayed UK release. Neil Burger's informative commentary, the "making-of" featurette and every review I have seen somehow ignore the elephant in the living room - the Eisenheim character's Jewishness. His real name is Abramowitz; the subtext of the alien outsider and his potential subversiveness runs throughout the story. The theme of rebellion against the corrupt and dictatorial regime bubbles to the surface on several occasions: the talk of a "spiritual revolution" inspired by spiritualism, Eisenheim's power over the agitated crowd outside the theatre, the scene where the ghost of the murdered Duchess Sophie apparently appears on stage before the suspicious audience - who explicitly accuse the Crown Prince of her murder. The suspect patriotism of Jewish communities throughout Europe was a sore point; this story is set around the time of the Dreyfus affair in France, and after the rise of socialist and communist movements inspired by the Jew Karl Marx. A few years later, a penniless vagrant in Vienna called Adolph Hitler had his first education in hatred - partly from local anti-semitic politicians and partly from his reaction to the visibly different observant Jews in the city.
Last week I saw a film with a most unexpected spiritual subtheme - "La vie en rose", the biopic about Edith Piaf. As a biography, the film is a masterpiece of evasion. It entirely omits her career in WW2 - an unforgetable period for any French person of her generation. The stories of her singing for senior German officers and entertaining Gestapo officers in her apartment above a bordello obviously wouldn't comfortably fit into the picture of the plucky French icon. But it does put repeated emphasis on her devotion to that most French of saints, St Therese of Lisieux, patron of your local basilica on 12 Mile Road (Shrine of the Little Flower -- see Stan's article on Mass Dimension for a description and pictures of this unique church), and shows her totally confused but sincere spirituality, along with her alcoholism, drug addiction, promiscuity, etc. The movie was shown in one of our local multiplexes, the Showcase on the east side of Reading, a rare honour for any foreign language film. Obviously the managers thought that there are enough English people "d'un certain age" who would want to see a Piaf movie. Or it might be desperation at the sight of another summer of Hollywood sequels - Shrek 3, Die Hard 4, Evan Almighty ( may Bruce Deliver Us!). Perhaps they thought that any remotely different or unusual film might attract filmgoers turned off by mainstream dross.
Unfortunately, the Showcase plainly does not employ the sharpest knives in the drawer. The only reason anyone in the Reading area is out of work is if you don't want a job. So any business which offers unsocial hours and low pay is going to find itself choosing from the near-unemployable of the English workforce ( 20% of our school-leavers are functionally illiterate and innumerate) or from the huge number of recently arrived East European immigrants who have an IQ above room temperature and a terrific work ethic, but limited English. This leads to much entertainment in local eating places. At a wedding reception last October, the Polish waitress came round with plates of ham salad asking "Who ordered pig?".
Which of these groups works in the Showcase projection rooms, I do not know, but the first ten minutes of "La vie en rose" were shown with the wrong lens, so it was horizontally compressed, with half the image and all the subtitles squeezed off. It could be worse. Years ago, I took a Greek friend to see "LA Confidential" at the Showcase and instead we started seeing "Eight heads in a duffelbag". After several minutes the embarassed staff moved the disgruntled audience into another theatre and gave us all free tickets for another show.Our town centre multiplex, the Vue, has shown two superb European films recently - the peerless "Battle of Algiers" and "The lives of others". Sadly, the audiences when I saw these movies were even thinner than those for Hollywood sequels, so I don't know if they will repeat the experiment.
The fact that they would even consider screening "Battle", a 42 year old black and white film in French and Arabic, shows that business must be flagging and they are willing to try anything. Amazingly, given the large Indian population in the Thames Valley and the fact that India has the largest film industry in the world, they have never screened a Bollywood film.
