Brooklyn & Joy

I went to see Brooklyn with definitely low expectations. It sounded like some mushy romance. So, what a surprise it was to become enthralled by a marvelous performance by Saorirse Ronan as a seemingly plain girl who flourishes when she emigrates from County Wexford to Brooklyn in the early 1950s.

The film captures the period perfectly, so perfectly that I had forgotten how much things have changed since then. Brooklyn then had boarding houses and fancy downtown department stores. My aunt would send me shirts as birthday presents from Martin's, an old-line store, and I recall my first major Italian feast visiting a colleague of my dad's there.

Her return to Ireland makes it clear that while the locals may conspire to provide her with reasons to stay--a highly eligible man and a decent job--she will always have to deal with the gossip, often ill-intentioned, of a small town in rural Ireland. 

All of this is depicted with total clarity and understanding of the relationships involved. Sure, as in all movies, things proceed somewhat differently from real-life patterns, but here, the performances, including two by old-time pros like Jim Broadbent and Julie Walters, are superb.

Joy is more of a conundrum. Jennifer Lawrence fans will be well satisfied as she is on screen almost all the time and is highly accomplished. Robert DeNiro does what he does best: play a blustery man who has severe limitations may even start to recognize them. Other players contribute well: Virginia Madsen, Diane Ladd, and Isabella Rosselini, to name three. Bradley Cooper apparently was desired and thus paid quite well for a somewhat minor role.

The whole thing, however, fell short for me. It was a plot packed with occasions for many of the characters to display their eccentricities. It all started to come apart even as the title character demonstrated her moxie in soldiering on despite every kind of obstacle and problem, most of them created by her incredibly dysfunctional extended family. 

To me, the producers reassembled the Silver Linings Playbook team, but with a less well-made plot and too much distraction. The result of all this is a picture that drags--I kept looking at my watch.

If You Don't, I Will

We don't get enough foreign pictures here in Washington. Actually, we don't get a lot of good American pics until weeks pass after their opening in New York and Los Angeles. Of course, today, we and every hamlet larger than a population of 50 has the new Star Wars picture, which I will go see soon, especially because it's playing at our local house, the Uptown, which has what you don't run into very often now: one large curved screen and a large palatial auditorium.

But the Avalon, which was saved by community action and is run by a community board, is out on Connecticut Avenue just before the Maryland line, and on Wednesday nights, it shows foreign films, usually French, Czech, or Israeli. I often give French pics a chance because if nothing else, their style is appealing. This week, they had, for only the one Wednesday night showing, a French film released earlier this year, If You Don't, I Will. 

I'd never seen the stars, Emanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, before; nor had I viewed any of the previous work of Sophie Fillieres. The picture isn't great but it has its attractions. It was reviewed, by the way, in New York in December 2014 and Variety caught it earlier at the Berlin Film Festival. It's about a married couple who are at odds with each other for not entirely clear reasons except that they seem to push all the wrong buttons after getting to their 40s, being empty-nesters since her son has recently moved out and lives with his pleasant girl friend.

Their flare-ups at typical parties or when running for a bus don't seem that outlandish. The best gag comes when they put some Champagne in the "super frost" part of the freezer and it cracks up in no time. The wife, Pomme (I recall how Diane Kurys used that name for the heroine in her charming picture, One Sings, the Other Doesn't.), suspects that husband Pierre is having an affair with a younger weather broadcaster. But this obvious provocation falls apart when the younger woman appears to become as fed up with him as his wife.

The climax of the picture comes when the two go for a hike in a large forest park near Lyons, where the picture is set (it looked just like Paris to me). Pomme decides she doesn't want to go home and goes off on her own into the woods. She camps out and hikes for several days, with a few adventures but nothing very major. She stops in a small town where there's a chamber music festival and it is delightful when she joins all the participants in the fest are at a huge dining table as they identify themselves by the instrument each plays. 

She returns to the forest and Pierre is finally urged by her son to pursue her, which he seems to do in a half-hearted way. When she eventually returns and they are back together, the ending leaves it unclear as to what will happen next. Just like life.