LA DERNIÈRE LETTRE
THE LAST LETTER |
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Director:
Frederick Wiseman
Screenplay: Véronique Aubouy, from chapter 17 of Vasili Grossman's
novel, Life and Fate.
Cast: Anna Semionovna: Catherine Samie
Running time: 61 minutes
Production: France/USA, 2002
Rating: Not rated (general audience)
Gauge: 35mm (B&W)
Language: French
Distributor: Zipporah Films
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"Visuals
reminiscent of German Expressionist film--the actress’s physiognomy
and the shadows surrounding her figure--combine with the pure power
of language to conjure up the lost world of the ghetto... Using these
subtle and minimalist means, Wiseman’s film builds to an emotionally
devastating conclusion." Leslie Camhi, The Nation. |
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For his first
fiction film, this renowned American documentary maker adapts his
own Paris stage production of La Dernière lettre,
itself a translation of an epistolary chapter from the Soviet-era
novel, Life and Fate. In 1941, an elderly Jewish doctor in
Berdichev, a town seized by the Nazis on their sweep through Ukraine,
writes a letter to her son from a ghetto where, with thousands of
other Jews, she awaits her annihilation. She describes the emergence
of her neighbors’ latent anti-semitism, the discovery of her
own growing sense of Jewishness, and how in the ghetto she maintains
her sense of dignity by teaching French and tending the sick. The
letter is elegant, insightful and unflinching, and Samie, the doyenne
of the Comédie-Française, recites it in a smoky, mellifluous
voice, conjuring up the full horror and sadness of the holocaust,
and the power of a mother’s love to rise above it. Filmed on
a bare stage using neither props nor music, the austere, stylized
production consists of alternating chiaroscuro shots: close-ups
of Samie’s hands or face, and long shots featuring her shadows,
either cast along the floor or mimed by actors silhouetted behind
curtains. A hushed, moving account of human suffering, the film
serves as an indictment of systematic persecution everywhere.
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| PHOTO Laurencine
Lot, all rights reserved. |
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