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Fugitive Pieces

“I did not witness the most important events of my life. My story must be told by a blind man from behind a wall from underground.” When a movie starts by whacking you with a statement like that, accompanied by a lugubrious cello sawing away in a major key, you know that you’re not in for a standard lightweight summer movie. Fugitive Pieces was the official opening night film at the 2007 Toronto Film Festival last September, and I can only guess that it’s being released to theaters now on the notion that audiences for serious drama will be so starved for product that they’ll flock to it. Adapted from Canadian poet Anne Michaels’s novel, this is the story of Jakob Beer (Stephen Dillane), who as a child in Poland saw his parents murdered by the Nazis. Perhaps even worse, he saw his adored sister Bella taken away by them, and has lived his adult life tormented by the question of what happened to her. Jakob is saved by Athos (the wonderful Rade Serbedzija), a Greek archaeologist who hides him for the rest of the war and then takes him to Canada. Like his patron, Jakob grows into an intellectual and an academic, just the type of person that movies inevitably depict as being self-serious narcissists. Director Jeremy Podeswa has done first-rate work in the past, both in films (the terrific 1999 feature The Five Senses) and television (Six Feet Under, Queer as Folk, Carnivale). But he’s too concerned with trying to translate the books poetic language into cinematic mood at the expense of story and characters. Beer’s plight eventually starts to seem like so much morbid wallowing (he resents his wife’s “shameless vitality”), and it becomes increasingly hard to care for or about him. Though I was unmoved, a woman at the screening I attended wept loudly as the end credits rolled. Maybe she’d read the book.

m. faust


Watch the trailer for "Fugitive Pieces"


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