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Jewish World Review July 11, 2001 /20 Tamuz, 5761
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| Christina Ricci as "Feige" in The Man Who Cried |
Elliot B. Gertel
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE sad -- and even frightening -- thing about The Man Who Cried is that it is a totally exploitative film, both thematically and emotionally, and yet takes itself seriously as a statement on Jewish survival and women's strength.
Though the film's writer and director, Sally Potter, has actually dubbed her movie a "story of survival," the movie is little more than a Harlequin romance spiced at the beginning and end by a Yiddish lullaby that shamelessly drags in a Holocaust theme in order to underscore the durability of its heroine.
The year is 1927 and a relative visiting Russia from America, seduces Tatte (Dad) with descriptions of life in a free country, a place where enterprise is rewarded. Tatte bites the bait and, promising to send for his daughter Feige, (Claudia Lander-Duke) and her grandmother, is soon off to the Golden Land --- but not before he sings his daughter the lullaby that she will always remember.
Almost immediately, the shtetl (village) falls victim to a pogrom, and Feige -- left only with a photograph of her father -- survives the disaster and the dangers of the road, only to be shipped to England by traffickers in refugee children.
In England, Feige is raised by insensitive adoptive parents who send her to a strict, Christian school. There, her fine singing voice is discovered and developed by the music teacher. Yiddish songs are quickly replaced by chapel hymns.
After graduating from her childhood downs and ups, Feige, now Suzie (well-played by Christina Ricci), joins cabaret dancers in Paris in hopes of making it to America to find her father. She rooms with a Russian dancer, Lola (a spirited performance by Cate Blanchett). The latter uses her beauty and wiles to attract wealthy men, including an Italian opera singer who prefers Suzie. But Suzie's heart belongs to daddy, notwithstanding a fling with a gypsy chap (none other than Johnny Depp) who enhances the opera set with his good looks and his trained horse.
As the Nazis capture Paris and round up gypsies and Jews, Lola manages somehow to score two tickets to America --- aboard a luxury liner. Feige/Suzie becomes the chief crooner in the ship's posh night club until it is decimated by a torpedo. She is left its sole survivor.
Arriving on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Feige succeeds at tracking down her father, who, believing his daughter dead and is grieving, has given up a cantorial career as well as his faith.
Dad, Feige learns from sweatshop workers in New York, is now a producer of musicals in Hollywood. Of late, however, he's been confined to a hospital in a state of burn-out.
Suzie/Feige is allowed to see him. He recognizes her immediately, she crones the Yiddish lullaby, and the film ends, suggesting (1) that all's well that ends well; (2) that Suzie/Feige may be just the pick-me-up that Dad needed, since his new wife and child cannot seem to revive him; and (3) that Suzie/Feige has stumbled upon more opportunities this time not only to survive but to get into pictures or at least into Daddy's will.
What utter tripe. This is the sort of tripe that still flourishes in supermarket romance novels, but one rarely sees on the screen.
Except, when it comes to Jews and the Holocaust.
Recent years have seen film after film that trash the morality that has guided Jewish women for generations in the name of an ethically deficient brand of "self-direction." These are portraits that are so untypical of that generation and its mores as to constitute an insult, rather than a pean, to Jewish womanhood at that time or any time.
This disturbing genre of Holocaust film began with Life Is Beautiful (1997), a self-styled "comedy" from Italy. In that movie, all of the Jews were bland and rather non-descript, with the exception of the hero and perhaps his uncle. It is the non-Jewish lover who is always the most noble, sacrificing and sexy character.
Continuing with the Hungarian film, Sunshine (1998) and The Governess (2000), the Jewish heroine show the "courage" to flaunt the mores and morality of both their country and religious tradition in order to to find strength, maturity, and "empowerment. "
Is it really too much to ask for the Jews in these movies about Jews to show some element of Judaism?
In The Man Who Cried, the owner of the theatre where Susie works, a Jewish man, overhears threats against Susie because she is a Jew, and does nothing to help her. An older Jewish woman lives in Susie's apartment. This woman has fled Eastern Europe but feels "safe" in France. The most she ever offers Susie is chicken soup with matzo balls. Could she not have directed Susie to the Jewish offices of the city to make some connection with the Jewish community and assistance to find her father? Did Susie never consider contacting the Jewish community in England, at least when she became a teenager (a perspicacious child would have thought of that sooner)?
As it is, Susie comes across as without the courage or the ingenuity to pursue her Jewish background, as a passive-aggressive who is not as good at manipulating men as her Russian friend and who actually goes out of her way to antagonize the people most dangerous to her and her friends. By the end of the film, we question even the depth of her bond to her gypsy lover, or her capacity to be loyal at all, Nazis or not.
Obviously, once having trotted out the Holocaust, Potter felt obligated here to "follow through" with an anti-Semitic villain. She chose her Italian opera singer, Dante, played with aplomb by John Terturro, who regards the Second World War as a "conspiracy of Jewish bankers."
In one bizarre scene, but not an outlandish scenario, either in terms of the character and of the times, Dante prays in the cathedral to the Virgin Mary that the Nazis take over Paris so that he, an expatriate Italian, can continue to sing in an anti-Mussolini France. Potter clearly intends for her audience to see the irony of praying to a Jewish mother for the murderers of Jews, and of this opera singer indulging in such a selfish and even homicidal prayer.
Potter therefore does everything possible, in plot and characters, to give Susie some higher moral footing. But does this succeed, at least as Potter intended? When Susie refers to Italians as murderers for collaborating with the Nazis, Dante replies that the Jews are the real murderers who "killed Christ." When he offers her his affections (and thus cheats on her best friend, his mistress), Susie rebuffs him in the nastiest way, provoking him to exclaim, "You think you're chosen?"
While, of course, the writer wants us to loath this bigoted and vain character as much as Susie does, the question remains whether Susie could have been more diplomatic with him and still kept her integrity instead of holding a moral superiority over him by virtue of her "empowerment" at having chosen to lose her virginity in an affair with a member of a more despised race. How "noble."
As if defending her heroine, and protesting too much in the process, Potter provides an interesting dialogue between Susie and her Russian friend. When the latter protests that Susie is too judgmental of this friend's picking up men for monetary support and social status, Susie protests: "I don't always accuse. I never said a word." The Russian dancer responds: "Your kind never do." There seems to be a double reference here-both, to "the Jews," who somehow are the judgmental ones of humanity without even trying; and to passive aggressives like Feige/Suzie, who invoke morality when it serves their purposes or when they are in need of "self-esteem."
By superimposing assumptions of the 1990s and early 2000s on a Jewish woman of the thirties and forties, The Man Who Cried has proved to be more insulting than uplifting. Indeed, its only "depth" is its capacity to be insulting on so many levels to the rank-and-file Jewish women of the period and to their mores, to traditional Jewish sensibilities, and to Holocaust films.
But maybe some good can come of this if we indeed recognize the shallowness and the hollowness of "Jewish feminism" as it is now depicted in films. It is neither Jewish nor
01/04/01: Oprah redefines Jewish philanthropy
Yet another pathetic Holocaust movie
Contributing writer Elliot B. Gertel, JWR's resident media
maven, is a
Conservative rabbi based in Chicago. To comment, please click here.
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