An achingly beautiful and quite touching movie.
The Man Who Cried (2001)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:68
Fresh:24
Rotten:44
Average Rating:4.8/10
Consensus: The storyline is overwrought and awkward, and the audience is distanced from the flatly drawn characters.
Runtime: 1 hr 40 mins
Genre: Dramas
Synopsis:
The year is 1927. A little Jewish girl (Fegele) lives happily with her father, a cantor, and her grandmother in a Russian village. But with the ever-present threat of persecution, her father leaves...
The year is 1927. A little Jewish girl (Fegele) lives happily with her father, a cantor, and her grandmother in a Russian village. But with the ever-present threat of persecution, her father leaves for America to find work and then send for his family. Soon after he leaves, violence engulfs the village. Fegele is bundled off with some fleeing villagers who hope to get to America, but she ends up on a boat to England.
Fegele is re-named Suzie, sent to a Christian foster home and to a school where she is forbidden to speak Yiddish but learns to sing. Ten years later she leaves England for Paris, where she becomes a chorus girl and befriends an ambitious blonde Russian dancer, Lola. She starts to save, hoping to earn enough money to pay for her passage to America. Together Lola and Suzie find jobs in the new opera company of impresario Felix Perlman.
Suzie falls in love with gypsy horse-handler Cesar, while Lola falls for Dante Dominio, an arrogant Italian opera singer. When the German army invades Paris, Dante, with Lola at his side, immediately collaborates with the Nazis, while Suzie joins Cesar and his band of gypsy musicians.
The Nazis have plans to round up the Jews and Gypsies. When Dante betrays Suzie, Lola decides to leave him: she tells Suzie that she will help them both get out. Suzie wants to stay and fight but Cesar encourages her to leave. Suzie is heartbroken, but eventually agrees.
In the mid-Atlantic the ship to America is bombed. Suzie is rescued but Lola drowns.
Once in America, Suzie continues her search for her father, which finally leads her to Hollywood... -- © 2001 Universal Focus
Starring: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, John Turturro, Cate Blanchett
Starring: Johnny Depp, Christina Ricci, John Turturro, Cate Blanchett, Harry Dean Stanton, Oleg Yankovsky, Miriam Karlin, Pablo Veron
Director: Sally Potter
Director: Sally Potter
Screenwriter: Sally Potter
Producer: Christopher Sheppard, Simona Benzakein
Studio: Universal Focus
Reviews for The Man Who Cried
It's impossible not to succumb to its lush romanticism and irresistible fusion of contrasting musical styles.
The film brings grace and balance to the traditional Holocaust story.
A mixed bag -- reasonably well-made and of some interest, but not the kind of movie to truly engage the viewer.
The romance and the drama often seem insincere and overwrought because of Potter's chimerical cinematic techniques.
The sort of film that has Americans adopting various European accents, not always in a convincing fashion.
The story is pretty cornball, with an ending that can only be called pure Hollywood.
a survivor story set against a historical background writ from the movie screen
Potter eschews drama for posing, politics for postulating, and provides enough symbolic broad strokes to gag a magic realist.
Ricci’s strong work is ultimately just support for Potter’s entrancing and emotional vision.
If [Potter] personally, in her 40s, can go to Argentina and become a tango dancer, then we can't complain about anything that happens to Suzie. Not that we'd want to.
After a vivid start, [Potter's] movie turns into an inventory of set-pieces nearly devoid of tension, momentum, even much sense.
Spotted with historical inaccuracies and groaning with dialogue so dreadful that it makes a fine cast look ridiculous again and again.
There's hardly a moment that feels authentic. Maybe that's why the man is crying.
A heartbreaking counterpoint to big war spectacles, beautifully performed by Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp and John Turturro.
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