Philadelphia Weekly

New Releases

Le Grand Role

Directed by Steve Suissa
B-
Reviewed by Leo Charney
Opens Fri., May 13

This odd yet affecting French comedy/drama plays like a hybrid of Diner (male buddies), Love Story (pretty girl's pretty death) and The Last Metro (French-Jewish actors).

It starts as a larky buddy movie, as Maurice Kurz and his four actor friends are all up for parts in a Yiddish-language version of The Merchant of Venice to be directed in Paris by a famous American director (Peter Coyote) who wants to use his clout to bring back Yiddish movies.

Maurice gets cast as Shylock, then he's uncast in favor of a bigger star. But he's already told his wife, who turns out to be dying. Because she's so happy for him, he doesn't tell her the job fell through. As she gets sicker, he has to keep up the ruse, with the help of his buddies-and ultimately the director himself.

The story could be played for laughs or tears. This movie splits the difference and goes for both-and then some. Is it a tragedy? A slapstick comedy? A study of the decline of Jews and Yiddish in France? A wacky-actor piece like Being Julia or Day for Night?

It's all of them, and therefore not enough of any of them. The changing moods sap each other's momentum, since the story keeps shifting gears just as one groove gets going.

The wife's tragic illness comes out of nowhere, the actors' comic schemes never build up a head of steam, and the Jewish/Yiddish theme doesn't develop into more than a plot device.

What's more, the heavy drama raises questions the light comedy can't answer. Why isn't the wife in a hospital? Why would a director cast a handsome young guy as Shylock? How plausible is it that a famous American filmmaker would do Yiddish Shakespeare in France?

Above all, how does the wife feel about her husband and her death? How does the husband feel about his career, his loss and his friends? How is the husband so self-centered that first he has no idea his wife's sick, and then he makes her terminal illness about his own success?

That's a compelling French movie right there. But it's deeper than this heartfelt yet shallow film wants to go.

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The Holy Girl

Directed by Lucrecia Martel
A-
Reviewed by Emily Brochin
Opens Fri., May 13

Three years after Lucrecia Martel's seminal La Ciénaga, the director is back with the equally stunning The Holy Girl. Both are meditations on family, sexuality and religion, and together form a diptych of despair and decay that arrives at an almost documentary-true depiction of love.

Danger seems to hover in The Holy Girl, which, like La Ciénaga, draws the audience into a heavily sensual world. Most of Holy Girl's characters seem to spend the majority of their time in various stages of undress, sprawled alongside a family member, asleep, bobbing in a pool or engaged in whispered conversations that come so close to being kisses, the tension is almost unbearable.

There are intimations of incest, as though the love and peril encountered within the family are metaphors for Martel's obsessively intimate vision.

The Holy Girl's protagonist, the dewy-skinned Amalia (Maria Alché), lives in a crumbling hotel run by her uncle and her divorced mother Helena (Mercedes Mor�n). The hotel hosts a conference of doctors, one of whom rubs up against Amalia while watching a street performance. The girl's almost orgasmic devotion to Catholicism leads her to seek the man out and try to save him.