Bruno 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.
An icon plays an icon as Catherine Deneuve steps into the role of a French cinema legend who reunites for a rocky reunion with her screenwriter daughter (Juliette Binoche) in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s elegant drama The Truth. The Japanese master delivers his first film made outside his home country, in French and English – two languages not his own, and loses not a step in an intimate drama that unfolds between the family home and a Paris soundstage.
The situation for gays and lesbians in Chechnya is beyond harrowing. They face arrest, torture, and sometimes execution. If they survive that, they are delivered back to their families with the suggestion that their kin finish the job of killing them. Some have joined the ranks of the world’s disappeared. This special project of strongman president Ramzan Kadyrov “to cleanse the blood” of the country’s LGBTQ population has been under way since 2016 with barely any notice from the rest of the world. Oscar-nominated filmmaker David France’s (How to Survive a Plague) tense, devastating documentary reveals the depth of an ongoing genocide and the efforts of Russian activists to rescue the victims of the atrocities.
Theater geeks everywhere will rejoice and many who would consider themselves impervious to the charms of a Broadway musical will find themselves seduced as Hamilton drops on Disney+ on July 3. Filmed four years while the original cast was still intact, but not intended for a theatrical release until the fall of 2021, with COVID-19 putting pause to the Broadway and road companies, the decision to push the date up by over a year and put it on the streaming service is a welcome one. No doubt there is a business calculation involved. Disney+ can expect to gain X number of subscribers through this shrewd move. But ultimately, who cares about the company’s motivation? Hamilton is here.
To adapt the play to the screen, director Thomas Kail filmed several actual live performances along with performances staged strictly for award-winning cinematographer Declan Quinn’s cameras, a set-up that included a Steadicam. This is not a Hamilton that even its most ardent fans have seen before. Close-ups reveal nuances to the performances lost to distance from the stage and provides a privileged vantage point from which to view Andy Blankenbuehler’s Tony-winning choreography. Jonah Moran’s editing injects a burst of new energy into an already adrenalin-fueled musical. Every performer, from Miranda and Odom to the ensemble, brings their A-game.
In 1934, a 17-year-old girl with skinny legs and a stained dress ascended to the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater for Amateur Night. She wanted to be dancer, but as she watched Apollo stars the Edwards Sisters’ agile footwork during the pro part of the evening, she knew she could not follow that. So, she switched gears, opened her mouth to sing and Ella Fitzgerald began her legend. Leslie Woodhead, who began his documentary directing career in 1969 with The Stones in the Park and has made films on everything from the Polish Solidarity movement to the post-9/11 manhunt for Osama bin Laden to Princess Diana, pays glorious homage to the First Lady of Song with this spellbinding documentary.
Moses (Toby Wallace, Boys in Trees) is every parent’s worst nightmare: A feral, homeless, and heavily tattooed drug dealer with sticky fingers and a terrible mullet. At 23, he is also far too old for 15-year-old Milla (Eliza Scanlen, Little Women‘s Beth). But the heart wants what it wants and Milla wants Moses and she is seriously ill, leaving psychiatrist Henry (Ben Mendelsohn, Animal Kingdom) and classical musician Anna (Essie Davis, The Babadook) to feel they have little choice but to let the ebullient felon into their lives. In the world of Shannon Murphy’s Babyteeth that accommodation to a situation neither parent wants is a moment of clarity: Henry and Anna cannot fix what is wrong with Milla, but they can allow her a small bit of control in a situation in which she otherwise has none.
42‘s Nicole Beharie and newcomer Alexis Chikaeze deliver incandescent turns as mother and daughter in writer/director Channing Godfrey Peoples’ arresting feature debut. Using a small Texas town’s Miss Juneteenth pageant as the lens from which to view a complicated parent-and-child relationship and a mom’s attempt to secure her progeny’s future, Peoples limns an indelible portrait of family and community life.
There is a sizeable cast in director/co-writer Patrick Vollrath’s breathtaking feature debut, set on a flight from Berlin to Paris in mostly real time, but only one actor who really counts: Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the flight’s co-pilot Tobias, an ordinary man thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Hijacking dramas are nothing new but this is not the stuff of a Steven Seagal or Kurt Russell movie. 7500 is not an action picture, but rather a slow-burn psychological thriller in which the hero’s defining trait is an ability to hold fear at bay on the worst day of his life.
Family, syn., blood, clan, kin, linage, tribe. Disappearance, syn., loss, concealment, hiding. Eccentric, syn., bizarre, erratic, off-kilter, off-the-wall, peculiar. Family, disappearance, and eccentric and their synonyms are words at the heart of this offbeat British melodrama in which an online Scrabble game reenergizes a father’s search for a long-lost son even as it stirs resentment in the child who remained home. Sometimes Always Never flirts with being twee (syn., cutesy, cloying, gooey), but never quite crosses that line, thanks to welcome doses of humor and assured performances form stars Bill Nighy and Sam Riley.
