Podeswa's confusing, commonplace film lumbers along with a painful sincerity.
Fugitive Pieces (2008)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:68
Fresh:45
Rotten:23
Average Rating:6.1/10
Consensus: Though the retelling is a bit too subtle, the moving story and solid performances lift Fugitive Pieces beyond standard holocaust tales.
Theatrical Release:29-05-2009
Synopsis: Adapted from Anne Michael's acclaimed prose-poem novel, FUGITIVE PIECES is a harrowing and haunting tale of Holocaust survival and personal awakening. The film opens in Poland, as young Jakob Berr... Adapted from Anne Michael's acclaimed prose-poem novel, FUGITIVE PIECES is a harrowing and haunting tale of Holocaust survival and personal awakening. The film opens in Poland, as young Jakob Berr (Robbie Kay) is hidden away just before German soldiers storm into his Jewish family's home. After watching his parents murdered and his sister dragged away to an uncertain fate, Jakob flees and hides in the woods. He is discovered by a kindly Greek archaeologist, Athos (Rade Sherbedgia), who smuggles the sickly Jakob back to his own island home and hides him for the rest of the war. Years later, having moved to Canada, the grownup Jakob (Stephen Dillane) has become a writer struggling to articulate his childhood horrors, haunted by the mystery of his sister's fate. But after his troubled emotions lead to the breakup of his marriage to the free-spirited Alex (Rosamund Pike), Jakob must exorcise the ghosts of his past if he is to close a traumatic chapter of his life and find beauty in the present. Director Jeremy Podeswa (THE FIVE SENSES) ably shifts between the different stages of Jakob's life, showing how grief can continue to influence one's actions--or inaction--in the years that follow a tragedy. Handsomely shot and thoughtfully acted, FUGITIVE PIECES is a touching testimony to the power of remembrance and redemption. [More]
Starring: Stephen Dillane, Rade Sherbedgia, Rosamund Pike, Ayelet Zurer
Starring: Stephen Dillane, Rade Sherbedgia, Rosamund Pike, Ayelet Zurer, Robbie Kay, Ed Stoppard, Rachelle Lefevre, Nina Dobrev
Director: Jeremy Podeswa
Director: Jeremy Podeswa
Screenwriter: Jeremy Podeswa
Producer: Robert Lantos
Composer: Nikos Kypourgos
Studio: Samuel Goldwyn Films
Reviews for Fugitive Pieces
Plays out with such daunting high-mindedness it makes The Reader look like Transformers.
Fugitive Pieces reduces the Holocaust and its aftermath to a cosy soap opera.
One of the most delicate, approachable and rewarding Holocaust movies of recent years.
Given the source novel, Podeswa's attempt to adapt Fugitive Pieces is admirable in itself. Yet despite an enthusiastic cast, this fails to transport you in the same way. Tying itself in narrative knots, the end result is stilted.
The movie has little dramatic momentum, and its journey is essentially Jakob’s incremental acceptance of his fate. But Dillane and the writer-director Jeremy Podeswa create such a compelling central character that it hardly matters.
His journey towards peace of mind involves lots of lyrical philosophising, which presumably comes straight from the film’s source novel, by Anne Michaels, and doesn’t lend itself to dramatisation, despite Dillane’s typically intelligent performance.
Anne Michael's complex, poetic novel is here adapted into a stolid, somewhat po-faced film, but one that still manages to tease some affecting drama out of its scholarly premise.
Despite a rich premise, the soul-searching of the older Jakob is, at best, curiously colourless; at worst, positively grating.
But while there’s life, there’s hope, and Jeremy Podeswa’s delicate, deliberate adaptation of Anne Michaels’ novel follows Jakob’s heartrending progress from the darkness to the light.
There are fleeting moments of poignancy and poetry, significantly when the script features narration taken almost directly from the novel, but this is clunkily written and poorly edited.
Jeremy Podeswa's tremulous adaptation of Anne Michaels's novel aches with earnest intent and tasteful eroticism, yet it moves as heavily and lugubriously as a prison gate.
Nostalgic, deeply felt, and refreshingly astute, "Fugitive Pieces" is something of a rare bird these days%u2014a big-budget, transnational historical drama that actually justifies its scope and subject matter with more than visual opulence.
mia ap' tis pio entimes, katharies ki eilikrineis synaisthimatikes istories poy mporeis na petyheis sto pani, i opoia an hanei kapoy, einai sti dynatotita tis na sikosei to baros ton filodoksion tis
take a dip into this thoughtful and intimate portrait of a man slowly warming to the beauty of life as he shakes off the ghosts of a family lost in the Holocaust.
A sentimental journey through inheriting loneliness and sadness from fathers to sons, and their female fantasies, relieved by beautiful language and cinematography.
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