Fugitive Pieces
The adaptation of Canadian poet Anne Michael's prize-winning novel about Holocaust survivors, Fugitive Pieces, opened the Toronto International Film Festival. Directed by Jeremy Podeswa, it stars Stephen Dillane (The Hours), Rosamund Pike (Pride and Prejudice), Rade Sherbedgia (The Quiet American) and Ayelet Zurer (Munich).
Lyrical and complex, Fugitive Pieces builds into a breathtaking mosaic as fragments of the past and present reveal the inner depths of a writer who cannot let go of the ghosts that haunt him. Acclaimed director Jeremy Podeswa powerfully fulfills the poetic intelligence of Anne Michaels’s beloved novel. He brings lush visuals and a sensual approach to Michaels’s beautifully vivid imagery, which earned her the prestigious Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction in 1997. Rarely have a filmmaker and a novelist been so perfectly matched as in this landmark collaboration between two formidable Canadian talents - or rather, three. Fugitive Pieces also bears the distinction of being the tenth film by acclaimed Canadian producer Robert Lantos to open the Festival.
Athos (Rade Sherbedgia) is directing an archaeological dig in Nazi-occupied Poland when he discovers a little boy hiding. After witnessing the massacre of members of his family, seven-year-old Jakob (Robbie Kay) does not know the fate of his beloved sister, Bella (Nina Dobrev) - a mystery that will haunt him the rest of his life. Athos smuggles Jakob back to his native Greece and hides him during the Nazi occupation there, hoping to mend the shattered boy. After the war they emigrate to Toronto, but as Jakob grows into a man (Stephen Dillane), he becomes progressively more consumed by his family’s tragedy and his longing for Bella. Then he meets Alex (Rosamund Pike) - bright, bold, a blast of sunlight - and, believing she can illuminate the dark corners within him, he marries her. But “to live with ghosts requires solitude.” (TIFF)
Peter Martin at Cinematical links to a mixed bunch of reviews. JD McNamara at Cinema Blend, who has read the novel, writes:
'Anne Michaels crafts her novel with a type of poetic imagery that I thought impossible to adapt for the screen, but Podeswa’s script and the film’s amazing performances manage to perfectly encapsulate the raw sadness and despair that weaves its way around the story. In a film where nothing much actually happens, I was amazed at how utterly captivated I was by one man and his feelings.'
Peter Howell at The Toronto Star is less convinced by the adaptation:
'[F]or all of the merits of Podeswa's painterly approach to Michaels' source novel, Fugitive Pieces seems curiously drained of drama. The message is uncertain.
'Jakob remains too much of a cipher, perhaps locked within the poetry of a novel that has made a difficult transition to the screen.'
I personally find it difficult to accept the opinions of critics who don't like Stephen Dillane, when I've always been amazed at every performance of his that I've seen. However, among his critics are Jeffrey Wells and Glenn Kenny, who writes:
'...Podeswa's film is so cautious, so polite, so tactful, so reluctant to jar or offend, so designed-even the little house in the Polish woods from which Jakob must flee looks like something out of a catalog, and for all the boy is supposed to suffer, he barely even gets his hair mussed-that one could be forgiven for taking this as a discreet, sensitive romance rather than a story of someone trying to resolve a past full of horror. Stephen Dillane's bland performance as the adult Jakob certainly doesn't help. I haven't read the Michaels novel, but a couple of coviewers who have tell me that it deserved much better.'
An excerpt of the novel.
Anne Michael's poetry.