Suzie: Christina Ricci
Lola: Cate Blanchett
Dante: John Turturro
Cesar: Johnny Depp
Felix: Harry Dean Stanton
12 May 2003
by Jasmine Park
In 1992, Sally Potter seemed poised for fame when she made Orlando, based on the Virginia Woolf novel. Visually resplendent and starring the exquisite Tilda Swinton, the film was one of the first notable arthouse films of the 1990s. Given her sparse filmography since then, one might have hoped she would become the female equivalent of Terrence Malick, making rare, gorgeous films and choosing her projects wisely. Instead, the two films she has made since Orlando only confirm its unfortunate singularity. Tango Lesson (1997) depicted her attempt to woo a sexy tango instructor by promising him a role in her next film, interspersed with various experimental scenes from an ongoing, imagined screenplay. With its attempt at a play-within-a-play story centered on a midget and several anemic fashion models, Tango Lesson defined pretentiousness, illustrating the autobiographical midlife crisis of a wealthy British woman incapable of coming up with a decent movie plot.
The Man Who Cried (2001) is Potter's most recent film, a pseudo-period piece with the kind of sweeping canvases and hopelessly romantic plotlines that make for predictable trailers. She assembles a dream cast that includes Johnny Depp, John Turturro, Cate Blanchett, and Christina Ricci, all actors who can easily work with great directors but apparently still hoped for the best with Potter. While Potter has, for the most part, abandoned her tiresome avant-garde style for straightforward storytelling, the film is still a mess, utterly soulless and contrived in all its melodrama. Christina Ricci plays the heroine, Fegele, a young Jewish girl who lives with her beloved father (Oleg Yankovsky) in the Russian countryside. Just after her father leaves to find a better life for them in America, rebels invade their village, and Fegele is shipped off to England to be brought up by a nondescript middle-class couple. As she grows up, she forsakes her Russian-Jewish heritage, adopts the name "Suzie," and is taken for a purebred British girl when she lands a gig as a dancer in Paris.
Once in Paris, she meets Lola (Cate Blanchett), a flirty Russian dancer who aspires to the high life by seeking out the company of wealthy men. Cate Blanchett, vying for the Meryl Streep Foreign Accent award, does her best with a meager role and comes out of the film with her reputation relatively unharmed. But it is unfortunate for the film that Lola, a character destined for the periphery, should generate infinitely more interest than the heroine herself. Lola meets a famous Italian tenor, Dante Dominio (John Turturro), who is in town to perform for the local opera house, and they become lovers. Meanwhile, Suzie falls for a dark, sexy gypsy named Cesar (Johnny Depp), a role that, by this point, Depp could play in his sleep - and given how sparsely written his character is, one suspects he might have.
Meanwhile, World War II begins, the Germans invade the city, and Suzie joins the gypsies (probably not the safest bet to place) while trying to hide her Jewish background. Eventually, Suzie and Cesar have a tearful good-bye, and she flees for America with Lola, but while crossing the Atlantic, in a puzzling bit of plot development, a bomb falls on their ship. Suzie nevertheless arrives in New York unharmed but sans Lola; thus the bombing appears to serve no purpose other than to get rid of Lola, who didn't really have to leave Dante and flee to America in the first place.
In creating the character of Suzie, it appears that Potter was banking on the "silent emotive heroine" strategy, but Ricci is hardly an actress up to the task. She is barely passable when playing a coldhearted vamp; as an ingénue with little dialogue for most of the film, she's utterly hopeless. And in the end, the moral of this story is left totally ambiguous, especially given the film's downright laughable resolution, which hurries Suzie through a couple obligatory scenes to find her father at last. Thinking his family in Russia long dead, her father has traveled to Hollywood and become a movie mogul, but lies on his deathbed just as Suzie arrives at the hospital. How convenient for Suzie - her Orthodox Jewish peasant father has become a Hollywood maharaja! Who would have guessed!
Apart from the incredulity of this ending, the film's only notable feature is the curious scene in which Johnny Depp has a good long cry for the camera. I don't remember ever seeing Depp shed such tears on screen before, and I suppose it is admirable that Potter could elicit such hiccupy acting from him. However, it is hardly to Potter's credit that she should so squander her actors in her attempt to overcome what is an obvious lack of imagination. The film leaves one with the hollow taste of a particularly bad made-for-TV movie; what confounds one is how much talent is wasted in the exercise.
Universal Focus presents a film written and directed by Sally Potter. Running time: 97 minutes. Rated R (for sexuality).
Christina Ricci and Johnny Depp
in The Man who Cried.
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