Philadelphia Weekly

Fugitive Pieces
Directed by Jeremy Podeswa
C+
Reviewed by Matt Prigge
Opens Fri., May 16

Alfonso Cuar�n has quite the task ahead of him in adapting Nicole Krauss' The History of Love, his potentially more challenging follow-up to Children of Men. The charms of the novel, a structurally inventive tale of a teenage girl and a Holocaust survivor, are exclusively literary, but with the right radical approach, the tale could find a whole new life in cinematic form.

As a warning on what not to do, Cuar�n would do well to watch Fugitive Pieces, Jeremy Podeswa's unimaginative and literal-minded take on Anne Michaels' bestseller. Like Love, Pieces explores WWII's effects on the present in ways that have no book-to-cinema analog. Podeswa's solution isn't to reimagine the source for a different medium but to simply transcribe the novel to a script and then film it, hoping the novel's gifts will automatically make the jump.

Hopping between two different time periods, as well as several differently filmed locales, Pieces stars Stephen Dillane as a Polish-born Jew residing in Toronto. As a 7-year-old, Dillane watched the Nazis murder his parents, and escaped thanks only to a kindly Greek geologist (the terrific Serbian character actor Rade Serbedzija).

Though he survived, his experiences have left him emotionally remote and obsessed with the past. This particularly peeves hot but energetic shiksa girlfriend Rosamund Pike (Pride & Prejudice), who can't break through his shell despite spending much of her limited screentime in a state of tasteful seminudity.

Thankfully the "annoying girlfriend" subplot ends fairly early, leaving Pieces to turn from the melodramatic to the cerebral, with Dillane seeking nothing more than inner peace. Of course few things are harder to depict on-screen than the search for inner peace.

While a writer has any number of ways to convey introspection, film is stuck with either a narration track or certain avant-garde tactics. Though he occasionally resorts to prose read on the soundtrack, Podeswa deserves credit for choosing neither, ambitiously trying to convey the extremely subtle in extremely subtle ways.

Pieces manages many expert moments, and even heroically drains the cliche from the man-moppet relationship between Serbedzija and the younger Dillane. But it ultimately feels as remote and unapproachable as its protagonist, keeping its revelations and mysteries private from even the audience. Pieces may have lovely passages, but its beauty is mostly skin deep.

Not Reviewed

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Noise
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Ongoing

Alexandra
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Body of War
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Flight of the Red Balloon
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