On August 31, PBS’ POV series presents Wo Ai Ni, Mommy(Chinese for “I love you, Mommy”). It’s a compelling, candid, and very satisfying story of transracial adoption, made by Stephanie Wang-Breal. A Jewish family, Donna and Jeff Sadowsky, in Long Island, New York, have already adopted a Chinese girl, Darah, from Guangzhou, China. They want to do it again, so their littlest will have a playmate. This time, an 8 year-old, Fang Sui Yong.
Donna and Faith Sui Yong Sadowsky embracing
The way Ms. Sadowsky describes her children, it sounds like they are all adopted, but since their non-Chinese children don’t stand out in a family photo, it makes you scratch your head.
According to the film, China opened itself to foreign adoptions in 1992; It’s been 18 years. And Wo Ai Ni, Mommy looks at the first 18 months of one adoption. Those months span from Sui Yong’s departure from China through her culture shock and conformity to America. We count down the 10 days in China to meet Fang Sui Yong and bring her to her new home, and then the days in America, which become weeks, and months. 18 months. This story is complex and intimate. It comes down to questions of “what is identity?,” “what makes a family?,” and many other often taboo ones about assimilation and “race.”
From the start, Faith slams into her first emotional cement wall: she’s really leaving, saying goodbye to her known world, to everything, and everyone she has know. She has a new name. She shows raw fear, discomfort, and bewilderment. There’s coaxing and gentle coercion that makes this ordeal, which everyone else is trying to celebrate, seem like a gentle kind of kidnapping. It’s an intense, lengthy, and wrought-up scene.
Faith Sui Yong Sadowsky holds the stars and stripes
Donna says that Faith’s full name will be Faith Sui Yong Sadowsky. She thinks it’s right, respecting her Chineseness – but that’s soon forgotten or just doesn’t come up. Maybe we don’t hear her full name because most scenes take place at home, and there isn’t a dramatic enough scene for either Donna or Jeff to blurt, “Faith Sui Yong Sadowsky!”
In the final act of her story, on video, Faith tells her dad that she feels more American than Chinese. After having striven to learn English and conform to America, her Chinese has faded. She no longer feels comfortable with it, especially among people who still use it. We sense that she has turned a page; she’s wary of her next American chapter. It’s implicit, but clear.
In-turn, her sense of twoness, her dual Chineseness and Americanness, has also changed. To some people, this often connotes a destructive portion of American culture. It often also helps someone who is, and still isn’t yet, accepted to feel connected to a mental and cultural anchor. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois’ “The Souls of Black Folks,” addressed this, a century ago:
“One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
When you replace Negro with Chinese, within the concept of social duality, the experiences are companions. In Wo Ai Ni, Mommy Faith Sui Yong Sadowsky’s “dogged strength” has changed in important ways.
Controversies, rhetorical and emotional, about transracial adoption abound. Faith will live, be loved, nurtured, and probably succeed in life. That’s twice as much as many children get.
Wo Ai Ni, Mommy is one excellent telling of a transracial adoptee’s special experience.
On August 27th, Mademoiselle Chambon, will open at Minnesota Film Arts’ St. Anthony Main Theater. It’s a French film, by Stéphane Brizé, and adapted from a novel by Eric Holder. An elementary school teacher, Ms. Veronique Chambon (Sandrine Kiberlain) clicks with a work-a-day dad, Jean, (Vincent Lindon) whose son she teaches. They click all the way into a tryst.
Mlle Chambon, the teacher, is enrapt with Jean's job talk
The trouble starts after she asks him to talk to her class about his work, construction. He agrees, with a shrug. He comes. He talks. He answers the students’ questions. He has a good time. Ms. Chambon likes Jean.
Love.
Lust.
Mid-life questions.
Wanderlust.
These are at Mademoiselle Chambon’s foundation.
This slowly becomes an affair. Jean and his wife, Anne-Marie, follow a predictable, seemingly content life with their son. They are manual laborers. One in construction, the other in a factory. And then Jean and we meet Mademoiselle Chambon. The predictability and contentment begin to crumble. The film starts in a deceptively daring way: it’s slow and tests our patience, and our typical conspicuous desire for action and fast-paced cutting. From the first POV shot where Jean glances at Ms. Chambon, from behind her as she sits atop a student’s desk, you know what will follow.
This meeting is supposed to be between parents and teacher. He has her undivided attention because his wife has fallen ill at the factory, and is on bed rest at home. The question to be answered: how deftly will, the director, Ms. Brizé execute their tryst? A fundamental and slippery rule of storytelling is to be predictable, but make sure that we’re surprised how it’s delivered. The tranquil and gentle tone and pace could lull us. But the way in which Jean and Veronique’s flirting grows from their lingering, even coy conversations, into something subtly disturbing is refreshing.
Jean and Ms. Chambon
The key scenes are cloaked in the guises of window repair, music appreciation, and where Veronique plays music at Jean’s home, during his father’s birthday. Somehow that scene strikes notes that are sweet, and creepy, at once. These subtle scenes played so that each might go either in the impulsive and lustful path, or the sensible and responsible one. We see what the film and its maker are doing when the duo’s conversations creep into a kind of small talk, which only happens when you can’t yet dare yourself to say what you need to. Jean and Veronique’s relationship is told more through silence, and coy body language than any explicit sentiments, as opposed to a North American movies’ typically forthright sensibilities.
Mademoiselle Chambon awaits destiny or..?
Neither of them is any more “at fault” for their attractions than the other; Jean pursues Ms. Chambon with as much interest as she does him. Ultimately Jean decides how and where their infatuation will go. That decision harkens to Richard Linklater’s mature 20-something romance, Before Sunrise, from 1991, where the défacto duo seriously asks each other whether they want to make love. Shall we do this when we’ll probably want more, and we have no idea if we’ll see each other after?
One more (ok, a few) open question: Each wants the other; each has found something that they lack in that other. Why is this story Mademoiselle Chambon’s; Why is it named for her? Won’t their wanderlust reap or wreak the most upon Jean and his family?
On August 13th, the Discovery Channel’s Investigation Discovery brings us Cropsey. Its trailer promises that this will be a cool and compelling true-life story. Cropsey is about missing children whose bodies haven’t been found, and ultimately the alleged abductor, Andre Rand. This documentary, supposedly a candid exposé of Staten Island New York’s very own bogeyman, is an amateur’s mess.
The filmmakers stand near the building that stands in for Cropsey
Amateur work can be worthwhile, but the key is how high of a quality you expect, and knowledge that amateurs do something out of interest, but haven’t the training for. The bogeyman might be real, but one of the few clear parts of the story is that there’s no physical evidence against their accused Mr. Rand, only the circumstantial type.
Cropsey begins by talking about a bogeyman who lurks in the woods, close enough to families for their children to be forewarned. I was psyched to watch a smart and well-executed film about a ghost story urban legend; about a bogeyman that wasn’t BS. Shortly after the prologue, it turns its attention to an institution, Willowbrook, which Geraldo Rivera’s reported on in 1972 and made into a villain for having warehoused the physically and developmentally disabled. That’s where the wheels fall from the cart. The institution and Mr. Rivera barely relate to this story, except with Willowbrook as a marker for a piece of evidence. The filmmakers linger on the topic for about 20-minutes.
The accused, Andre Rand, with detectives, for a "perp walk"
We watch the morose and disturbing stories about five missing Staten Island children, Hank Gafforio, Holly Ann Hughes, Tiahease Jackson, Alice Pereira, and Jennifer Schweiger, their five families’ agony, and the NYPD detectives’ frustrations and guesses over what might have happened, and whether the suspect did what they’re “sure” he did. Nothing is resolved.
I kept watching, waiting for the body of the film to have the thrills that the trailer and the prologue promised. I watched, waiting for things to make sense, and for me to have a reason to pay attention. After the messy and confusing investigation, Cropsey provides mostly speculation and suppositions, but no answers, or satisfaction. I don’t remember having heard a reason for either the name or the title Cropsey! This leaves you as empty as when Mr. Rivera opened Capone’s safe live on TV in 1986 – finding nothing!
This story is chilling because you can connect the children’s photos to the families who still yearn for closure. Confusion, frustration, and a slow pace stand out.
The story resembles the hodgepodge path that detectives walk while investigating, before cleaning up the files in order for lawyers to make sense of it. There’s meager if any reason for the sequence of investigative events that Cropsey shows. If the film were as well executed as the news release, then it might be worth watching. I want to see that film!
Cell 211 is a perverse melding of a charming love story, which turns wistful, and a prison uprising spanning one day, and which might remind you of the Attica prison uprising in 1971. This day in Juan Oliver’s (Alberto Ammann) life can go down as the most absurd and tragic almost first day on the job.
Mistaken identity is at the story’s core: Juan’s injured by an accident, his tour guides, and future peers place him in a newly empty cell, 211, just at the moment that the inmates take the prison – That moment upturns his life. The inmates, and their leader Malamadre (Luis Tosar) mistake him for one of them and he must play along in order to live. If the consequences weren’t dire – death or worse – it would make a black comedy.
Juan and Malamadre in the beginning
This is a Spanish language film, by Daniel Monzón, with bits of Basque thrown in, and subtitles in white. Cell 211 opens on August 6th, in Minneapolis’s St. Anthony Main, for Minnesota Film Arts, where it’ll play for one week.
The opening scene tells you that something awful, even grisly, has just happened. The story starts with a jaw-dropping scene where an inmate begins to mutilate his arms. Most films particularly American ones start viewers off smoothly, this one was like, “eh, why bother?” It sets the tone for an emotional, thematic thrill ride that Hollywood provides only every several years. This came from Spain, so never mind.
Although Cell 211 isn’t a Hitchcockian story, it harkens to one of his stock themes and characters. Juan is the ordinary person stuck in the extraordinary situation. The story’s bizarre ironies and tragic twists are classically Hitchcock, making North by Northwest, from 1959,pop to mind. Specifically a spy’s line, which describes Roger Thornhill’s situation: “It’s all so horribly sad. How is it a feel like laughing?”
You’re plunked into a foreign situation, mistaken for the kind of person you could never be, which fills you with adrenaline as you make yourself a part of a den of murderers and worse. No one wants to live that scenario, but it and this film are a heck of a ride. Unlike in the United States, the prisoners here wear no uniforms, but blue collar, industrial clothing. All Juan has to do to fit in with his new “peers” is to shed accessories that will reveal himself.
Juan after his breaking point
Cell 211 is far better than average for a few reasons: it boasts a semi-complex and refreshing structure, with traces of Japan’s Rashôman, from 1950, and a special use of mistaken identity that allows for perverse and tragic twists, which otherwise would fall flat. The story alternates between three different locations and places in time, and between the tragic and the tranquil: Juan goes to the prison, his imminent workplace, to get his feel of the land. After being injured, he’s caught behind his future “enemies’” lines, and accidentally mistaken for one of them. This chunk of the film mixes with a segment from earlier that day, which builds up to a splendid, and utterly surprising, slight romantic subplot. That’s his love story with his wife. Before he goes to the prison, Juan and his wife chat, mock, and make love to each other.
A different, morose, but also slight subplot balances out the romantic one, where shadowy debriefings with a prison boss and a guard after the incident has passed. The first is taciturn, the other empathetic: morose and shaken. It helped viewers find closure to Cell 211′s chaos.
Now for a little math. Many of the characters are interesting. Five of them are important. Three of those are pivotal: Juan, Malamadre, which sounds like Bad Mother, the inmate who leads the prison’s most violent section, and Elena, Juan’s wife, who plays a incidental, and passive, but pivotal role. The men compete for the lead, at least in our minds. Their personas are disparate, but compel our attention equally. There is Juan, who should probably question working as a prison guard. He’s an affable husband who might not be enough of an Alpha male, seems more like a library manager or a grocer than a prison guard. He belongs in a suburb, mowing his lawn, not mowing down an inmate who has a shank poised against his jugular.
Juan and Malamadre. An incongruent team.
The leader of the uprising, Malamadre, while unsettling at least at first, is more rational and reasonable than we hear at the start. Then again, Hannibal Lector could be a great conversationalist too. Malamadre is quick with violence, but he’ll take the time to step back if talking or thinking will give him what he wants as easily. He’s a brawny, highly intelligent, calculating criminal, with a goatee and a voice that’s so gravelly you wonder how long and intensely he’s been smoking. He’s so well drawn, with such magnetism that, while this is Juan’s story, he and Malamadre become a surprising and unsettling duo. Sometimes they compete for starring attention.
But the barely likely connection between Malamadre and Juan allows the story to broach a very subtle story about the fragility of a moral compass. How easily it can be detoured or perverted. A law man meets a vicious, daunting criminal, then a heart wrenching tragedy strikes and that moral man finds that the road to or line between the moral & legal and their opposites have grayed and frayed in his mind. This, after circumstances put him off-balance and push him toward an abyss that’s darker and more of a hell than merely being caught among those who are hungry, rabid wolves.
As splendid as Cell 211 is, it has problems.
Specific ideas are sacrosanct in film:
You don’t remake Alfred Hitchcock
…or Martin Scorsese, and some others, and
You never have someone attack an obviously vulnerable person. …Unless you do it deftly. This film does it so.
Malamadre and Juan bond hastily and too slickly to convince us. Malamadre’s reputation having preceded his first scene, foreshadows the sort of foe with which the bosses and guards must contend. While Mal is smart, he’s there for a reason. He’s hardened, vicious, and doesn’t mind killing someone, if there’s a purpose. Juan is not. Their bond is forced, but it’s drawn with such care that you won’t notice unless you love to think through or debate that kind of detail.
Few films are flawless. Still, if you’re into grades: 4.5.
Anne Frank wrote her final diary entry on August 1st, 1944. This is a lifetime removed from us. A reality removed from ours in many ways. As a teenager she had to confront her own angst and misgivings and a separate stress, which the Nazi’s stirred. According to the director of education at the Anne Frank Center USA, Maureen McNeil, for many people “Anne is the face of the Holocaust.” Her enthusiasm for movies distinguished and invigorated her personality.
She devoured her weekly copies of “Cinema and Theater Magazine” while in the annex. On this day let’s think about how contemporary American films represent Jewish Americans or American Jews, and particularly how some films reflect Anne’s last diary entry. Which 20th- and 21st-Century film portrayals of Jews reflect Anne’s angst or misgivings?
Anne yearned to reconcile contradictions within herself and her persona: a silly, precocious public persona versus a quiet, studious, and private one. After having recently adapted her diary, PBS provides a thorough look at Anne and her legacy. She described herself as such: “flippant, boy-crazy, smart aleck.” She wrote that “No one knows Anne’s better side, and that’s why most people can’t stand me. Oh, I can be an amusing clown for an afternoon, but after that everyone’s had enough of me to last a month. Actually, I’m what a romantic movie is to a profound thinker — a mere diversion…”
Her internal narrative is the story of reconciling two sets of selves and personal contradictions: on one hand, one between the public, accepted, and acceptable, and the other hand the private, the unknown, the strange, the not yet accepted, or acceptable. ”Her inner-self was just a person. Her outer-self was Jewish,” Ms. McNeil said.
"The Diary of A Young Girl" Anne Frank
Sixty-six years ago Anne wrote her final entry. Contemporary Jewish American films are more than two generations removed from Anne’s last entry, from the Shoah (another and favored word among Jews for Holocaust); it is a pillar of a collective cultural memory. How do American gentiles understand Jewish characters in American films? How do they reflect that internal duality, which made Anne see herself through different cultural lenses? If we don’t limit the scope to the last generation, the last 30 years, this question could be daunting.
The indelible, hallmark film about the Shoah is Schindler’s List. I mention this because I remember when Steven Spielberg began to describe it: “Everybody knows that Nazis are bad…” He wanted to go beyond that to show one who stood out for his humanity. When you watch portrayals or listen to a survivor, their memories confront you with images of brazen evil, barbarism, and brutality. The Shoah doesn’t define the American Jewish experience, but it probably is the one suite of images that typifies it for American gentiles.
How to interpret these hefty questions through 20th- and 21st-century Jewish American films? First off, concentrate on those selections from only the last generation. In fall 2009, “moment” a magazine of “independent journalism from a Jewish point of view” published a thorough list of 60 films, from 12 renowned experts and scholars on Jewish films. They considered what were the best ones that reflected their people or sensibilities.
Detective Bobby Gold must confront his identity
I was surprised that “moment’s” film list omitted two titles: David Mamet’s Homicide, a crime drama from 1991, and Edward Norton’s Keeping the Faith, a comedy from 1998, and written by Stuart Blumberg. These are two disparate films, set in similarly disparate worlds, and presenting similarly disparate Jewish characters: one, Rabbi Jake Schram, for whom his faith and cultural traditions define his life and identity; the other Detective Bobby Gold, for whom his faith and cultural traditions do not at all define or even inform his life, profession, or identity. Both carry cultural identities bound to their profession and peers. But for Mr. Gold it’s secular and American. For Rabbi Schram they’re his people and his faith.
This excerpt from Siskel & Ebert At the Movies, summarizes Det. Gold’s crisis most pithily. At 1:15 we witness the detective’s confusion and self-hate.
This is something that, when addressed by W.E.B. Dubois’ “The Souls of Black Folks,” is a singular American experience: “One ever feels his twoness — an American, a Negro; two warring souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” When you replace Negro with Jewry or Judaism, within the concept of social duality, the experiences reflect each other. The more the Jews felt constrained, persecuted, the more this was their reality, even though weren’t burdened by color, but by their customs and traditions.
In an e-mailed response, a frenetic and harried scholar, Lester D. Friedman provided this hint as to how to approach my question in reconciling private and public selves: “The issues which occupied the generation of Jewish filmmakers who followed WW 2 (I am thinking her particularly of Allen, Brooks, Mazursky, Lumet, etc) no longer concern modern Jewish filmmakers (such as Aronofsky, Singer, etc.) in the same, visceral way.”
There’s Barry Levinson’s Avalon, from 1990, which Friedman criticized for emphasizing, even celebrating or idolizing assimilation, while omitting the frequent context of culture clash. He slammed it for omitting questions of otherness, bigotry, and their inherent growing pains. No questions are raised when the protagonists Anglicize their names, going from Krichinsky to Kirk.
In “American Jewish Filmmakers,” a book that he co-wrote, he describes three categories of Jewish art and creative expression: “humor, social justice, and life-style trends.” Keeping the Faith touches the trio, while Homicide focuses solely on how Det. Gold’s interest in social justice resuscitates one in his own ethnic or religious identity. The more relevant and visceral questions are about no longer being “the other,” about comfort with yourself, public acceptance, and finally just how far you’ll allow assimilation to be a salve.
Anne’s most naked admission about this was, “…Keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if…only there were no other people in the world.”
Anne wasn’t devout: the religious part of her heritage was incidental. Being a good person and a great writer interested her more. The vital or decisive question isn’t that of zeal but of elementary respect for her culture. Det. Gold, while respecting himself as an investigator, doesn’t as a Jew; he is confused, self-conscious, and ashamed. He disrespects his heritage.
As we compare Bobby Gold to Jake Schram, we find in the detective what Anne could have become, at its darkest, had she succumbed mentally to her most destructive questions to or doubts about herself. At some point, Det. Gold found himself too frail or fragile to grow beyond whatever hateful messages convinced him to betray his Jewishness. Rabbi Schram is absurd comic flipside to the detective. The reality of finding your sense of place and identity in a world that rarely and barely understands it lies probably in a dynamic spot between these two characters’ mentalities and their worlds.
Anne, at least as she portrays herself, was too smart, and had a sense of self, and family community that was too strong to become a Bobby Gold. This is a key to the strength, inspiration, and promise that people find in her words and legacy.
