La derniere lettre (eng subs) [2002] Frederick Weisman

http://bayimg.com/EAKBFaadb La derniere lettre (2002) The Last Letter http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0317341/ French language with hard English subtitles Directed by Frederick Wiseman Writing credits Véronique Aubouy writer Vasili Grossman novel "Zhizn i sudba" Vasili Grossman play Frederick Wiseman monologue Cast Catherine Samie ... Anna Semyonovna The Last Letter is unlike any previous Wiseman movie, but it is not a complete departure. The dean of American cinema verité here documents a stage production—his own—which is itself a sort of imaginary document. For just over an hour, a lone actress (Catherine Samie) recites an epistolary chapter from Life and Fate, Soviet writer Vasili Grossman's posthumously published novel of World War II. The letter is sent to the novel's protagonist, a scientist in Moscow, by his aged mother Anna Semionovna, a doctor in German-occupied Berdichev; he receives it presumably after she has already gone to her death. Grossman's own mother was similarly obliterated when the Nazis swept through Ukraine during the summer of 1941—a disappearance that evidently obsessed the novelist for the rest of his life. Not surprisingly, this fictional letter haunts his massive, self-consciously Tolstoyan book, as well as the suppressed dossier on German atrocities that Grossman compiled after the war. (He continued to write to his mother, years after her presumed death.) The movie The Last Letter is thus an instance of multiple ventriloquism—Wiseman re-creates a performance articulating a voice from the grave that itself emerged from Grossman's own desk drawer 15 years after his own death. The Last Letter reverses the sentimental injunction in which the immigrant child is enjoined to send a brivele der mamen—a little letter to mama. The mother describes her life—or rather Grossman imagines it—in concrete detail. Filled with quick sketch characterizations, the letter is a superb piece of writing, and Samie, the senior member of the Comédie-Française, gives what was surely a mesmerizing reading when The Last Letter was staged in Paris. For the film, Wiseman uses multiple set-ups—alternating close-ups of Samie's face and hands with stagier long shots. Shrouded in black, save for her emblazoned yellow star, the white-haired actress wanders among the shadows. The desire for visual interest is understandable, but one could "watch" The Last Letter with eyes closed. This is very much a radio play—Wiseman's mise-en-scène might be the patterns cast on the ceiling. As the filmmaker is a child of the radio age, perhaps that's what he had in mind; in any case, being a child is partially what The Last Letter is about, both as horrifying bedtime story and overwhelming expression of maternal love. Samie has a deep, smoky voice and the capacity to fill her wide eyes with un-shed tears. Her performance is austere yet histrionic, aquiver with despairing laughs and wry asides. Still, the text does not precisely speak itself. When the actress smiles sadly or pauses to hum a melody, the effect is more Comédie-Française than Berdichev ghetto. Indeed, it is a bit disconcerting to hear the material recited in French. As rendered in the novel, Grossman's "mother"—with her acute self-analysis, sudden rhapsodies, and sentimental compassion for the little people ("charming, eccentric, sad")—is the voice of 19th-century Russian literature.

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