Apr 24 - May 1 - Cascadia Weekly

Cascadia Weekly #2.17 04.25.07 Do it 3 | Letters 4-5 | Views 6-7 | Currents 8-16 | Get Out 18 | Words & Community 19 | On Stage 20 | Art 21 | Music 22-25 | Film FILM 26-29 | Classifi eds 30-38 | Food 39
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fi lm REVIEW
REVIEWED BY DON WILMOTT
fi lm
reviews fi lm times
Avenue Montaigne
A celluloid sojourn in the City
of Lights
AN ABSOLUTE must for Francophiles and a great
choice for anyone who loves a vibrant ensemble dramedy,
Avenue Montaigne is a bustling delight, a slice of Parisian
artistic life that will have you dialing Air France the morning
after you see it.
Set in a small theater district in Paris, the movie tracks
the intersecting lives of a virtuoso pianist, a successful actress
and a rich old art collector, each of whom is facing a
huge life change. The connections between them are facilitated
by Jessica (Cécile De France), a young and innocent
country girl who has arrived in the big city and taken a job at
an atmospheric cafe patronized mainly by the artistic types
who live and work nearby.
Jessica is thrilled to wait on her favorite television star,
Catherine (Valérie Lemercier), who is appearing in a play
across the street. A fi ery, larger-than-life thespian, she’s a
hilarious bundle of nerves, the Parisian version of an Almodóvar
heroine. All she wants is to be cast as Simone de
Beauvoir in an upcoming biopic, but to get the part she’ll
have to convince the American director (Sidney Pollack, es-
sentially playing himself). She
gives it her all at an uproarious
dinner meeting during which
the two destroy both French and
English while trying to communicate.
Concert pianist Jean-François
(Albert Dupontel) has had it with
the grind. He’s a genius, but he’s
ready to leave the circuit, build
a house in the country and play
in hospitals and prisons and for
people like Jessica, whose charming
lack of musical knowledge
makes him realize how sick he
is of playing to the same stuffy
audiences. His wife/manager has
other ideas, however.
And the elderly and super-rich
Jacques (Claude Brasseur) is also
in the neighborhood, supervising
an auction at which he plans
to sell his beloved and priceless
art collection while his gold-digger
girlfriend hovers and his son
Frederic (Christopher Thompson)
jabs at him for his distracted
parenting and disrespect of his
now-dead mother. Again, it’s
Jessica and her admiration for
one of Jacques’s Brancusi sculptures
that inspires both Jacques
and Frederic.
Writer/director Danièle Thompson
has an intensely powerful feel
for the neighborhood she captures.
Every detail is perfect. The
fi lm looks and sounds great, from
the croissants in the café to the
lovely theater interiors. Bits and
pieces of the Eiffel Tower are almost
always present in the background
as Jessica darts across
the street in her waitress uniform
to make food deliveries to the
concert hall or the theater.
All the characters face their
life-changing decisions with authentic
surges of fear and enthusiasm,
and Jessica, who thinks
she’s merely observing all these
dramatic lives, is actually egging
them on without even realizing
it. She’s simply delightful, and
it’s a pleasure to watch her work
her subtle magic on this crowd of
fascinating people.
fi lm REVIEW
BY ROBERT W. BUTLER
The Cats of
Mirikitani
It’s not really about cats
THE CATS of Mirikitani is an astonishingly rich documentary
that began with a simple case of curiosity.
In 2001, New York fi lmmaker Linda Hattendorf became
fascinated with the aged Asian man living on the streets
of her SoHo neighborhood. Unlike other homeless people,
this old fellow seemed tremendously motivated, spending
every waking moment drawing.
Armed with large sheets of paper and a collection of colored
pens, 80-year-old Jimmy Mirikitani labored for days
on each of his self-described “masterpieces.” Most were
delightfully cartoonish portraits of cats (a traditional
Japanese subject). The others were vast, eerie landscapes
of the desert internment camp in which Jimmy and 18,000
other Japanese-Americans spent World War II.
At fi rst his drawings look like folk art. But with remarkable
frequency Jimmy produces something absolutely
breathtaking in its composition, playfulness and use of
color. Hattendorf discovered that University of Kansas
painting professor Roger Shimomura was one of Jimmy’s
regular customers.
Hattendorf began fi lming Jimmy at work, revealing a
stubbornly independent man who refused all offi cial assistance,
though he accepted a Korean grocer’s offer to
spend the winter in a plastic-enclosed space in front of his
store. Jimmy was eccentric, certainly, but far from mad.
He didn’t talk much, but when he did he was coherent.
He revealed his past to Hattendorf: Born in Sacramento,
moved to Hiroshima at the age of three, returned to the
United States in his late teens, spent 3 1/2 years in a
camp (his sister was sent to another camp; he never saw
her again), renounced his U.S. citizenship under pressure
and lost most of his living relatives in the atomic bomb
attack on Japan. After the war he moved to New York City,
and for the last 25 years has lived on the streets.
Oh, yes, he hates the U.S. government.
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