Category Archives: Reviews

THE LAST VERMEER sketches out Dutch artist’s postwar peril

19 Thursday Nov 2020

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Guy Pearce as Han Van Meegeren in TriStar Pictures’ THE LAST VERMEER.

Guy Pearce, who played Andy Warhol in the Edie Sedgwick biopic Factory Girl, plays yet another 20th-century artist in Dan Friedkin’s The Last Vermeer, Dutch painter and art dealer Han van Meegeren. Imbuing the character with equal parts charm, arrogance, exuberance, and a deep well of humor that never deserts him even as van Meegeren faces the gallows, the actor is riveting in this delicious slice of historical drama.

In the Netherlands in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Dutch judicial system is running full speed to punish those who collaborated with the Nazis. Among the targets of the investigations is van Meegeren, who sold one of the country’s national treasures, a rare work by 17th-century master Johannes Vermeer, to Nazi leader Hermann Goering. Captain Joseph Piller (Claes Bang, The Square), a former Resistance fighter, is the man leading the inquiry. At first certain of the artist’s collaboration with the enemy, that conviction wavers in the face of van Meegeren’s spirited defense that casts his actions in a vastly different light.

At times, The Last Vermeer takes on the suspenseful tones of a thriller as Piller finds himself at odds with a judicial bureaucracy that has already made up its mind and is out for blood. But eventually the film settles into an involving courtroom drama. That van Meegeren’s guilt has been predetermined is understandable. Even without the receipt of sale for the looted Dutch masterpiece, the artist’s opulent lifestyle in a country where most of the population has suffered deprivation and hardship simply looks bad. How was he able to keep his fortune in a country occupied by Nazis? In defending him, Piller has his work cut out for him, and part of the pleasure in watching the film, is watching that defense unfold. The question of van Meegeren’s actual relationship with the German high command lingers tantalizingly over the proceedings. Is he innocent? Guilty? A trickster who is both at once?

In contrast to Pearce’s ebullience, Bang offers a sober portrayal of a man trying to do the right thing. A Jewish man who covertly fought the Nazis, Piller is well aware of what collaboration with them meant, even if collaboration in this instance was selling a piece of art and not overtly aiding the Nazis’ war/genocidal efforts. A man of conscience, he seeks justice, not revenge, which puts him at odds with the prevailing mood. His insistence on following the case wherever it leads sets him against an unforgiving system. He is the beating heart of the film, a hero of the resistance who is still fighting the good fight.

Based on van Meegeren’s tribulations after the war and adapted from Jonathan Lopez’s book, The Last Vermeer shines a tantalizing light on a small chapter of World War II. Weaving together biography, the force of two strong personalities, and the legend of a Dutch master, it is a potent blend of drama with the history of art and war. –Pam Grady

The Last Vermeer opens in theaters November 20.

A monster in the White House in ’70s-era THE WEREWOLF OF WASHINGTON

16 Friday Oct 2020

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The Nixon administration and its misdeeds inspired this queasy horror comedy set in the august halls of the White House. Writer/director Milton Moses Ginsberg could have gone for a more on-the-nose scenario with vampires sucking blood out of bodies and the body politic, but instead he unleashes a malevolent hound on the Oval Office. In this curio from 1973, playing on the Metrograph‘s virtual screen Oct. 16-22, Dean Stockwell is the hapless assistant press secretary for whom things get a little hairy at the full moon.

It is the director’s cut that the Metrograph is screening and Ginsberg has added a note to the beginning of the film that it has taken him 40 years to come to terms with Nixon’s presidency and find the right cut to The Werewolf of Washington. The statement seems innocuous enough until you watch this slim – only 70 minutes – but wild feature and are left to wonder what ended up getting cut and what might have been restored at some point. This film is bonkers.

Among the few oblique references to the actual Nixon administration is newly minted deputy Jack Whitter’s (Stockwell) address in the Watergate apartment complex. A one-time reporter who used to cover the White House and dated the president’s (Biff McGuire) daughter Marion (Jane House), Jack leaves his latest post in Hungary to take the new job. But he brings a little bit of Eastern Europe back with him in the form of a curse, something Jack only becomes aware of at the first full moon after his arrival.

Ginsberg juggles two narratives, one a satire of Washington politics, with a boorish blowhard (no, really) installed in the Oval Office. McGuire is terrific as a crass pol who never listens to anyone and blusters his way through every situation. In one of the film’s funniest moments, the president is bowling in the bowels of the White House when his ball gets stuck in the return. He insists that Jack accompany him down the lane to retrieve it. The site of McGuire and Stockwell gingerly making their way down adjoining gutters is hilarious.

The rest of the movie is taken up with Jack and his problem. He tries to explain it to Marion’s fiancé (Beeson Carroll), a Navy psychiatrist, only to be met with derision. As the body count around Washington mounts, Jack’s panic mounts, but no one will take him seriously. He is tortured and cannot stop staring at his hands, but the president and others are not sympathetic. Instead, they question Jack’s masculinity.

A two-time acting award winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1959 for Compulsion and 1962 for Long Day’s Journey Into Night and a future Oscar nominee in 1989 for Married to the Mob, Stockwell attacks his role here full-throttle. He makes grand use of those expressive eyebrows of his as he begins his transformation, signaling another wild night out on the town. It is not a subtle performance, but Jack is a role that cries out for over the top and the actor delivers.

In the waning term of our own century’s shambolic presidency, a scant two-and-a-half weeks before the election and two weeks before Halloween, the time is right for the return of this monster mashup. It’s a howler. – Pam Grady

A woman warrior claims her destiny in MULAN

04 Friday Sep 2020

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Disney blinked and more’s the pity. Mulanis a rip-roaring, sweeping epic, action-packed, involving, and colorful. It deserves to be on the big screen. But hemorrhaging money as COVID imposes its misery on the happiest place on earth, the company is hoping to recoup some of its losses with a $30 surcharge to its Disney+ subscription. It’s a small screen, after all.

A quasi-remake of Disney’s 1998 animated tale, this live-action Mulan dispenses with songs, the dragon, and other elements of that first adaptation of the Chinese folk tale. In this version of the story, a young girl, Mulan (Crystal Rao), is already practicing her warrior moves, influenced by her father Zhou’s (Tzi Ma) stories of his experiences on the battlefield and in thrall to the sword that his prized possession.

She grows into a beautiful young woman (Liu Yifei), but even as her father warns her that a female warrior would bring disgrace to the family and her mother Li (Rosalind Chao) reminds her that a woman brings honor to her family when she makes a good marriage, Mulan never loses that independent streak. Her chance comes when the government seeks conscripts to defend the kingdom from the nomad would-be usurper Bori Khan (Jason Scott Lee) and his horde. Disguising herself as a male, Mulan goes off to war.

Mulan Is at its lightest in the film’s training camp scenes. A soldier’s life is something she has anticipated and trained for her all her life. Skill sets her male counterparts are just learning she already possesses. She is awkward out of necessity – not only does she not know the world or experiences of boys, but she does not dare do or say anything that might give her away. The deception tugs at her conscience even as her heart tells her that this is her destiny.

Director Niki Caro, who rose to prominence with Whale Rider (2002) before going on to make such films as North Country (2005) and The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017), takes the reins of the most expensive movie ever made by a woman and every bit of that $200 million is apparent on screen. The battle scenes are tense and thrillingly choreographed. Mandy Walker’s cinematography is crisp and luminous. Grant Major’s production design, Anne Kuljian’s set decoration, and Bina Daigeler’s costume design blend into a kaleidoscope of often jewel-toned color, adding a sense of richness even to Mulan’s modest home village.

Mulan represents Disney’s latest step away from the princess-in-need-of-rescue narrative that was the company’s bread and butter for so many years. As portrayed by Rao and Liu, the girl who will be a warrior is a strong, resilient young person with the courage and fortitude to make her dreams a reality. A fierce conviction that the battlefield is where she belongs and that it is her duty and her destiny to protect her family and her country animate her. Mulan has lessons to teach the patriarchal society she was born into – and to a contemporary society watching her ancient battles on screen. –Pam Grady

JAZZ ON A SUMMER’S DAY basks in new restoration

12 Wednesday Aug 2020

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Louis Armstrong

Photographer Bert Stern, best known for his pioneering ad work –he was the “original mad man,” according to his official bio – and glamorous portraits of Marilyn Monroe, made only one film in his career, Jazz on a Summer’s Day. That documentary, freshly restored to 4K, is enough, though, to make one regret that Stern – who died in 2013 – chose to stick to still photography.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day is Stern’s impressionistic chronicle of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. At its core, the film is a record of the performances that include sets from jazz greats Jimmy Giuffre, Thelonious Monk, Anita O’Day, Sonny Stitt, Gerry Mulligan, Big Maybelle Smith, George Shearing, Dinah Washington, Chico Hamilton, Louis Armstrong, as well as rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Chuck Berry, and gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. For anyone who loves the best of music from that era, this is bliss, from Giuffre’s instrumental that opens the film to Dinah Washington’s soulful rendition of “All of Me” (during which she playfully joins in on vibraphone during the song’s instrumental break) to Armstrong’s energetic “Tiger Rag” to Jackson climaxing the film with a soulful “Lord’s Prayer.”

America's Cup

Beyond the world of the stage, Stern sought to capture the full essence of Newport on that tuneful weekend, roaming the town and the concert grounds with his camera. A Dixieland band riding in an open jalopy brings its joyful noise to the city’s streets, horns blaring. Stern follows along, later catching the young musicians playing on the beach at sunset. Children frolic in their yards and at a carnival.

Sailing trials for the America’s Cup were at Newport that weekend, too, and Stern is there, flying along overhead or skimming along the water with the boats. The images of a trio of yachts bobbing on the water cross-cut with Thelonious Monk performing “Blue Monk” are indelible.

The camera ventures into the festival audience capturing young lovers dancing, parents grooving along with their children, and the rapt faces of entranced fans. Pianist George Shearing appears in one of these asides, a huge smile on his face as he mimes playing a keyboard while Louis Armstrong wails on stage. The only sound in the film is the music itself, announcements from the stage, and the occasional off-camera remark, typically a conversation between festival organizers. The cinematography is a rich kaleidoscope of sounds and pictures.

Mahalia Jackson

Stern was 29 when he shot Jazz on a Summer’s Day, and already one of America’s premier photographers. For this project, he dispensed even with light meters, he and his fellow camera people Courtney Hafela and Ray Phealan using their own judgment when it came to setting exposures. They deliberately broke rules – shooting directly into stage lights, for example.

When Stern was done that weekend, he came away with a collection of gorgeous, color-saturated images. Jazz on a Summer’s Day is visually spectacular, never more so than 62 years after it was shot. IndieCollect’s 4K restoration amplifies the film’s beauty, the complement to its aural enchantments. The doc was always glorious, now its shimmering qualities have been enhanced. It is a pure delight.  –Pam Grady

Jazz on a Summer’s Day opens virtually at CinemaSF and BAMPFA on Aug. 12 and the Roxie Theater on Aug. 14.

A Neeson family affair: MADE IN ITALY

07 Friday Aug 2020

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Made+In+Italy+Still+1The echoes of two actors’ shared reality lend unexpected emotional resonance to this engaging Tuscany travelogue, actor James D’Arcy’s (Agent Carter, Homeland) feature writing/directing debut. What might have been a slight relationship drama between a fractured father and son takes on real weight when the father is played by Liam Neeson and the son by his own progeny, Micheál Richardson. In a story that touches on a young adult feeling like he can never measure up to a celebrated parent, Richardson proves that is not an issue in the Neeson household.

There are eerie parallels in the situation between Jack (Richardson) and Robert (Neeson) and that of the actors that play them. Jack lost his mother and Robert his wife in a car crash when the boy was a child, just as a skiing accident claimed Richardson’s mother and Neeson’s wife, Natasha Richardson, when Micheál was in middle school.

In Jack and Robert’s case, the death opened a chasm between them that neither now knows how to breach. Robert, a respected artist, simply stopped creating as grief consumed him. Jack, only seven when his mom died, can barely remember her or a time when he belonged to a happy family. He brings his father to their old Tuscan villa not to strengthen any familial bond but because he needs money and selling the property is his only prayer of getting it.

There is no mystery about where all this is going, but that scarcely matters. The views are stunning, the villa at the top of a hill overlooking a verdant valley. In contrast, the long-neglected villa is decrepit and full of weasels, but somehow no less charming for it. Selling the property is clearly the height of insanity, but can Jack see that?

Valeria Bilello (Sense8) plays Natalia, a restaurateur who catches Jack’s eye, while Lindsay Duncan is Kate, a realtor tasked with selling the house who just happens to be age appropriate for Robert. Father and son returned to England after the tragedy, never to look back until now. What remains unsaid could not be clearer: In Robert’s inability to cope with his loss head-on only made a bad situation that much worse for father and son. Jack, in his desire, for quick cash has inadvertently backed his father and himself into a long-delayed reckoning with the hole in their lives.

A syrupy score and an over-reliance on Italian pop grate on the soundtrack, but mostly Made in Italy floats on the strengths of its glorious setting, the amiability of its storytelling, and the strengths of its performances. In particular, Neeson father and son are terrific, a coup of casting for a first-time director that pays off in the rich emotional shadings they bring to their roles –Pam Grady

Made in Italy is playing in drive-ins, theaters, and digital and cable VOD platforms.

 

 

Offbeat pairing animates WWII drama SUMMERLAND

31 Friday Jul 2020

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SummerlandAlice (Gemma Arterton) has well earned her reputation as the town crank in her small seaside village. So nasty is she that you half expect the townspeople to start shouting, “Burn the witch!” She has that effect, but her surliness does not mean she is not expected to do her part as World War II ravages Europe. Volunteerism is thrust upon her – a woman without an ounce of maternal instinct or selflessness – when Frank (Lucas Bond), a young refugee from the London Blitz, is put in her care. So goes the set-up of Summerland, Olivier award-winning playwright and theater director Jessica Swale’s big-hearted feature writing/directing debut.

“Stories have to come from somewhere,” Alice, a writer, tells Frank. They also have to be going somewhere and where this one is headed is evident from the first meet-mean between a guardian who wants nothing to do her charge and a boy blessed with a sweet disposition and endless charm. An opening scene set 30 years in the future with an aged Alice (Penelope Wilton), still living in the same cottage and pecking away at what looks like the same manual typewriter she’s used since at least the 1940s, only underlines that Summerland is a tale following a predictable path. But plot mechanics scarcely matter in this endearing film. It is the personalities of Alice and Frank, and the endless small details that make up their lives that matter.

The title refers to the pagan idea of an afterlife, a concept Alice introduces to the child. Summerland is part of her research into myths and legends. She also brings Frank to a seaside bluff to look for Fata Morgana, the mirage of the sea. In this case, what she hopes to spy is an image of a nearby castle, seemingly floating in the air. The ideas capture Frank’s imagination, his enthusiasm creating a small chink in Alice’s armor.

Frank also bonds with new schoolmate Edie (Dixie Egerickx), united in shared interests. Separated from his mom in London and his dad off fighting the war, his prickly guardian and new friend are a balm for his loneliness. Frank’s presence in Alice’s house begins to have the same effect on her, even as it reminds her of how she came to be so bitter and isolated in the first place after a breakup with girlfriend Vera (a luminous Gugu Mbatha-Raw). The wound simply never healed.

Shot in Sussex along the region’s glorious white cliffs and gorgeously lenses by cinematographer Laurie Rose, Summerland offers picture-postcard views of the English countryside. But what makes the drama so inviting are the sharp characterizations of Alice and Frank, and the performances. Arterton, a Bond girl in Quantum of Solace and, more recently, Vita Sackville-West in Vita & Virginia, has never been better as she essays a role where thorniness is Alice’s defining trait yet she must also suggest just enough heart to make it believable when Alice’s ice begins to thaw. Bond is terrific as a child thrown into a lion’s den at a time when his life is already unsettled, yet who finds a way to thrive.

Together, the actors’ chemistry is irresistible. Summerland is a resolutely old-fashioned movie that wears its sentiment on its sleeve. That could have been a disaster, but Swale’s confident storytelling never cloys. Instead, she spins a captivating tale, shot through with gruff humor. Alice’s village might reject her; audiences will gladly spend time in her prickly world. –Pam Grady

Summerland is playing in drive-ins, theaters, and digital and cable VOD platforms.

THE RENTAL: Scarebnb

24 Friday Jul 2020

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Rental_AR_05.23.19_234.ARW

Rental_AR_05.23.19_234.ARW

There is such a thing as “too good to be true.” That is the terrain actor-turned-director Dave Franco explores in his feature directing debut, The Rental, a chameleon of a film that morphs from relationship drama to edge-of-your-seat thriller in a compact 88 minutes. What The Shining did for isolated mountain lodges, The Rental stands to do for luxury home shares. Be afraid, very afraid of what might be lurking just below sleek surfaces and a host’s five-star rating.

The house is huge, really too big for two couples, Charlie (Dan Stevens) and Michelle (Alison Brie), and Charlie’s brother, Josh (Jeremy Allen White), and Mina (Sheila Vand), on a short weekend getaway. But the home’s beauty and its placement on a bluff overlooking the ocean are the perfect backdrop for the celebration of business partners Charlie and Mina’s latest success. At least, that is the theory.

Mina’s immediate dislike of Taylor (Toby Huss), the property’s caretaker, and faint but evident fissures in both couples’ relationships cast discreet shadows over the trip, but part of the beauty of the script that Franco wrote with mumblecore veteran Joe Swanberg (Drinking Buddies, Happy Christmas) is that he spins a yarn where the audience is far more clued in than the characters.

The weekend never quite goes as either couple plans – Michelle is on a different wavelength than everyone else when it comes to having fun, Charlie and Mina both have reasons to question their relationships, and  Josh has a troubled past that affects his relationships with his sibling and his girlfriend. So far, so mundane, but Franco privileges the viewer with another point of view, one that hints of malevolence in the offing, Someone is watching. The question that hovers is whether the trouble in the offing will come from within or outside of the house?

Performances are uniformly excellent, even if it is hard to work up much sympathy for characters that are whiny, entitled, and sometimes downright awful. The plot is set at a low simmer, only coming to a full boil in the last half hour or so. The sedate tempo, Danny Bensi and Saunder Juriians’ eerie score, and the pea-soup fog that surrounds the house at night blend into a menacing atmosphere. The tension slowly ratchets up until at last the house reveals its horrifying secrets. For this sleek, suspenseful film’s director, it is quite a calling card. –Pam Grady

The Rental is playing in drive-ins, theaters, and digital and cable VOD platforms.

 

 

 

Ross brothers find truth in fiction in BLOODY NOSE, EMPTY POCKETS

23 Thursday Jul 2020

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bloodyCharles Bukowski would recognize the habitués of Las Vegas dive bar the Roaring 20s. So, would you if you put in any time in a bar that is welcoming enough and has been around long enough to attract a dedicated family of regulars. One of those places that doesn’t call itself a “cocktail lounge” and doesn’t employ mixologists, but a joint for a beer and a shot among strangers who become friends. And for the regulars at the Roaring 20s in Bill and Turner Ross’ shambling, engaging documentary, it is time to spend one last night together there as “last call” really is just that for a watering hole about to close forever.

The twist is that Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is not a documentary at all. There never was a Roaring 20s in Las Vegas. The Ross brothers shot some of the shabbier, off-the-Strip streets way back in 2009 shortly after the big financial implosion. But nearly a decade went by before they circled back around to that Sin City footage. In the interim, the siblings upped their profile with the releases of Tchoupitoulas (2012), Western (2015), and Contemporary Color (2016).

Revisiting their Las Vegas idea, they opted not to revisit Las Vegas, instead auditioning bars in their own city New Orleans, eventually finding one with the right timeworn but inviting ambiance. Then they populated the place with a large ensemble of barflies, some actors, others one suspects not, and allows them to improvise their way through the Roaring 20s’ last hurrah. The Rosses make no attempt to hide their cameras, so the film crew, too, becomes part of the mise en scène.

Anchoring the story’s kitchen-sink realism is weathered, white-haired Michael Martin, playing a homeless regular who is the first customer in the door in the morning and the last to leave in the wee hours of the next day. He is gruff but friendly, helpful, and he has no illusions about his life. As the final minutes count down on the Roaring 20s, he counsels Pete (Peter Elwell), a young musician following Michael’s same path of dissipation, “I’m 58. I look 70. I used to be an actor and I used to be pretty good at it… You need to get out of here while you’re still a musician.”

Not all of Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is that heavy. There are moments of humor, scenes of affection between people who exist together only in this space and know they may never be together again, the nostalgia that comes from the realization that something is coming to an end, and the petty, drunken spats that erupt when booze flows like water.

From the opening frames as Michael makes his way down a shabby street on his way to the bar, Buck Owens’ ’60s country classic “Big in Vegas” striking a plaintive note on the soundtrack, Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets sets a bittersweet tone. Set in the here and now (the day after Trump’s election, in fact), the muted tones of the cinematography and the nature of tipplers who scarcely seem to exist outside of their favorite dive give the film a timeless quality: It could have been set at any time in the last 50 years and little would change, except at one time Michael would have been the young actor on the receiving end of a friendly lecture.

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets is an impressive feat for the Ross brothers and their large ensemble. For all of its artifice, a kind of truth emerges. Maybe not actual facts, but there is an undeniable sense of emotional veracity that imbues every frame. The film might not fit a documentary’s traditional parameters, but the emotions and personalities that inhabit it lend it a verisimilitude that make it more real than any reality show and far more resonant. –Pam Grady

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets plays at the Roxie Theater Virtual Cinema starting July 24. Bill & Turner Ross will take part in a Zoom discussion, 5 P.M., July 29.

 

THE 11TH GREEN tees off

10 Friday Jul 2020

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11TH GREENWhat if aliens really did walk among us? What if they brought us technology that could solve the world’s thirst for energy without destroying the planet? What if there were government entities whose sole mission, going back decades, was to keep all of this a secret in order to preserve the status quo? What if every American president was in on it, but was prevailed upon to never reveal the truth? What if a gadfly reporter stumbled upon all this? These questions are the starting point for writer/director Christopher Munch’s sometimes intriguing, sometimes silly sci-fi drama The 11th Green.

Munch, who previously made Letters from the Big Man (2011), the tale of a woman’s involvement with a sasquatch, goes X-Files with a film that runs on two tracks. In one, journalist Jeremy Rudd (Campbell Scott) travels to California when his Air Force officer father, Nelson (Monte Markham), dies. Revelations from Laurie Larkspur (Agnes Bruckner), his dad’s comely last assistant, and the old man’s protégé Larry Jacobsen (Currie Graham), a slippery intelligence operative, convince Jeremy he is on to a big story. Meanwhile, the president of the United States (Leith M. Burke) – nameless, but clearly Barack Obama, right down to a childhood connection to Hawaii – communes with President Dwight Eisenhower (George Gerdes) and an ET named Lars (Tom Stokes), receiving the country’s most closely guarded secrets.

While seemingly tailormade for the QAnon conspiracy aficionados among us – that phrase “Deep State” gets bandied about a lot – The 11th Green is entertaining even for those unwilling to buy into its lunacy. The main location in California’s high desert is evocative and occasionally amusing with the golf course the title refers to providing a bridge between the Eisenhower era and the present day. Scott brings his low-key charm to the tale, while Graham is cheerfully sleazy and Burke makes a convincing stand-in for Obama.

At times, one wishes that someone like David Lynch were the director. In particular, it is easy to imagine the scenes involving the President, Eisenhower, and Lars achieving the eerie aura of Twin Peaks and its Red Room, but Munch never quite gets there.

Also, what is the deal with Lars? He looks like white, European Jesus and Stokes’ stilted performance is perhaps meant to suggest an extraterrestrial’s otherness, but he only comes across as jarringly artificial. And a subplot involving James Forrestal (Ian Hart), the United States’ first Secretary of Defense, a man who in real life suffered from depression and committed suicide, is tasteless.

The 11th Green is handsomely shot with exceptional production design, two more pluses in one mixed bag. It is one of those movies that is both entertaining and irritating, sometimes at the exact same moment. Ultimately, Munch manages to avoid most of the sand traps and other hazards he sets for himself and keeps The 11th Green on the fairway. Mostly. –Pam Grady

The 11th Green is playing at the Roxie Virtual Cinema.

 

 

 

 

Ganz takes a lovely final bow in The Tobacconist

09 Thursday Jul 2020

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Tobacconist 3Bruno Ganz famously played Hitler in Downfall. Now, in one of his final roles in Nicolaus Leytner’s The Tobacconist, he steps into the role of Sigmund Freud, a man who might have been one of the Fuhrer’s victims had he not been to flee to England. Ganz’s delightful performance portraying the warm, soft side of the father of psychoanalysis is a ray of light in this otherwise dark drama set in pre-war Vienna.

Freud is not the protagonist of the tale, an adaptation of Robert Seethaler’s novel. That would be Franz Huchel (Simon Morzé), a young man sent by his mother from the rural hinterlands to Vienna to apprentice with tobacconist Otto Trsnjek (Johannes Krisch). The big city proves eye-opening for Franz, who quickly becomes besotted with flirty, gap-toothed Bohemian immigrant Agnezka (Emma Drogunova), a spiritual sister to Cabaret‘s Sally Bowles. At the shop, Freud is among the regular customers, and the two form an unexpected bond, the older man compassionate toward Franz’s romantic travails and providing an ear for the youth to talk about his vivid dreams.

Set in another era, The Tobacconist might have been a sunny coming-of-age tale of first love and offbeat friendship. But this is Vienna during the rise of the Nazis. From Otto, a World War I vet who gave up a leg for the Fatherland and will not bow to the Nazis, Franz learns as much about politics as he does about the care of Havana cigars. From Agnezka he learns about the vagaries of love. From Freud, he learns that he is not in the world to find answers, but to ask questions. From Freud and Otto both, he learns just how far he is willing to go for a friend, a lesson that takes on new urgency under the pall of Nazi occupation.

Leytner’s imaginative staging of Franz’s dreams – Franz confronting an iceberg in one, an apparently nude and recumbent Freud drifting a rowboat in another – and the flights of his imagination add a layer of surrealism to the drama. Even the most benign exchange with a Nazi amps up the tension, lending The Tobacconist the aura of a thriller. It has elements of romance in Franz’s awkward courtship of Agnezka. Then there is the friendship between Franz and Freud, an initially unlikely relationship the blossoms into a special connection for both men. The scenes between Ganz as the wise doctor and the naïve youth inject the film with welcome warmth.

The Tobacconist is not the last film that Ganz made before his 2019 death, but it is apparently the final one to screen in the US.  The actor’s performance is one of immense charm. His Freud represents a lovely final bow, as the curtain comes down on an acting giant’s 60-year career. –Pam Grady

The Tobacconist opens July 10 at the Balboa Theatre/Cinema SF and other virtual screening rooms.