Customer Reviews
A beautiful and sensitive movie - By: Gary Selikow, 12 Jun 2008 
A beautiful & sensitive movie about a Jewish child , Faygele (Claudia Lander-Duke) , in Russia , in 1927 , whose father emigrates to the USA , intending to send for his family later.
However , in the meantime , Faygele's shtetl is burned to the ground by the Communists , & most of it's inhabitants slaughtered.
Faygele is spirited to England , where she is renamed Suzie , & brought up in the British middle class.
As a young lady (Christina Ricci) Suzie makes her way to Paris , where she makes a career from her talent for singing & dancing.
She is befriended by a fellow dancer Lola (Cate Blanchett) , & is romanced by a dark brooding gypsey horseman Cesar ( Johnny Depp)
When the Nazis storm into Paris , Suzie is betrayed by the villainous Italian opera singer Dante (John Turturro) & must now decide how to deal with the danger, given her Jewish background.
A wonderful exploration of how human lives are affected by upheaval.
visually stunning gem - By: L. Dorward, 05 Jun 2008 This kind of film will either leave you feeling moved or feeling bored. I luckily was taken with this film straight away. It does narrate in quite a slow pace, but it does it with maturity & elegance.
It tackles a rather tricky subject naimly the war. We first meet Ricci's character as a young girl living in Russia with her father. These scenes of rural life are particuarly visuallly stunning & capture the mood of the place to the full. Her life then changes when a man from the village comes back with tales of jobs & prosperity in America. Ricci's character is then left with her grandmother.
Riots then falll upon Russia & the little girl is sent on to where they think is America but is in fact London.
Several years later & Riccis character is desperate to find her father in America, so she joins a dance group in order to fund her way there. She ends up in France. Other characters in this part of the film are Blanchett who is exquisite as a Russian temptress & Depp as the sultry & silent gypsy.
Depp once again is quite happy to be in the background of a film, yet through his pure genius in silent acting takes the film with his role.He is not only beautiful to look at he also has so much meaning & power in the way he manages to say so much with such a little vocab. Ricci too for once manages to hold her English accent for a while enough to pull the part off. This is a visual stunner with enough heart in it to make you feel for the characters particuarly Depp & Blanchett. Dont watch this film if you have a low attention span or cant sit through films that are artisticallly visual in their meaning. however if you enjoy the slow paced film watch this its packed with beauty & life, it also has a strong story & meaning behind it which finishes in a thought-provoking haunting way
Thought provoking and moving - By: M. James, 09 Feb 2008 
I found this film both thought provoking & moving, yet on a subtle level. It is not an intensified expose of religious & social persecution, in comparison to the harsh realities expressed by so many of such genre. However this film's success lies in its ability to connect the audience with a variety of characters, thus alllowing identification with the individuals concerned & the tribulations which they encounter. Although key elements of social & political upheaval construct the fundamental theme throughout, a greater emphasis is placed upon the personal quest of the protagonist (Fegele), played by Christina Ricci. This film offers a sophisticated account which highlights the struggle to maintain & defend one's true identity, from a variety of cultural perspectives.
BORING - By: K. Baker, 17 Jan 2008 
This film has been reviewed extremely highly by others so I was sorely disappointed when I set through 50 excruciating minutes of weirdness. I gave up watching after that as i couldn't care less about the fate of any of the characters. Please don't waste your time watching this film, I wish I hadn't.
A despicable traitor and a narrow escape - By: Jacques COULARDEAU, 02 Jul 2006 The film tries to bring together four different types of refugees. Southern Italians who migrated to Northern Italy & became mussolinians. Russian female dancers who fled away from the Bolshevik revolution & are ready to use their bodies to get acquainted with rich people, no matter what. Russian Jews, representing alll Jews, running away from persecution, Russian or German, communist or nazi. Gypsies who are at home nowhere & are always shuddering in front of some danger but always fighting with their one & only family, for their one & only family, for survival. And the film covers about 15 years of European history starting in 1927. It is a very sad film with negative events & persecution adding up, year after year to a total deculturization that is imposed onto alll those who do not fit - the very word used by the Welsh teacher who will teach Fegele-Suzy how to sing & who was punished for speaking Welsh in school - in the normalized society in which they live. And yet, deep in the deepest depth of one's soul there is an island or a cavern where one is what one has always been & will always be. It is callled resilience & the film is a marvelous example of such resilience. One can always survive in one's mind if one believes in the power of human memory: never forget the past, just cultivate it in your mind's eye & it will come back one day. The film is also a powerful lesson of love. Love is the power to convince the one you love to run away from danger & live, though you have to stay behind & fight. And the man who loves Fegele-Suzy that much can cry alll night when she sleeps in their last night together & pretend he is asleep when she is ready to go. And yet the film never gets sentimentalese. It remains extremely pure, perfect & does not waste time & energy on self-pity or pathetic schmaltzy compassion.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne
