Daily Archives: December 22, 1995

Sabrina

Alot better than one might have expected, this remake of Billy Wilder’s weakest romantic comedy of the 50s manages to minimize the jaded, dirty-old-man aspect of the sub-Lubitsch original (a flaw it shares with Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon) with better casting. Humphrey Bogart certainly had his gifts, but Harrison Ford makes a much better romantic lead as a tycoon opposite a gamine chauffeur’s daughter; and if Julia Ormond initially seems to be playing Audrey Hepburn rather than Sabrina–an impression furthered by various references to Funny Face–she eventually takes over the part for herself. Sydney Pollack directs with the sort of old-fashioned polish that was easy to take for granted two decades ago but almost looks like classicism today. With TV-talk-show host Greg Kinnear as the tycoon’s brother (originally played by William Holden), Nancy Marchand, and John Wood, in a script by Barbara Benedek and David Rayfiel, who adapted the original screenplay that Wilder, Samuel Taylor, and Ernest Lehman based on Taylor’s play. This is basically double-dealing Hollywood nonsense with all the usual dishonesty, but it goes down easily. Ford City, Golf Mill, Lincoln Village, North Riverside, Water Tower, Norridge, Old Orchard, Webster Place. Read more

Lamerica

This masterful and extremely moving feature by Gianni Amelio (Open Doors, Stolen Children) is a powerful piece of storytelling that recalls some of the best Italian neorealist films. It depicts the adventures of an Italian con artist (Enrico Lo Verso) trying to set up a fake corporation in postcommunist Albania in order to get his hands on state subsidies. With his business partner, he digs up a traumatized 70-year-old former political prisoner to serve as the phony president of his phony company, but the poor creature–whose memory, like Albania’s links with the outside world, seems to have frozen a half century earlier–keeps wandering away. (Finding the old man at one point shoeless in a hospital, the hero is able to reclaim him only when the wife of another patient, silently realizing her husband will never leave his bed again, offers her husband’s shoes–a beautiful bit of silent exposition that perfectly illustrates Amelio’s uncanny gifts of suggestion and implication.) The story only grows in dimension and resonance as it proceeds, becoming an epic, multifaceted portrayal of a postcommunist Europe awakened from its slumbers by TV and consumerism–as illuminating a portrait of what’s now happening in the world as we can find in movies. Read more