Sally Potter is a director in love with beauty, and at her best she makes devotees of her viewers. She'll be remembered for "Orlando", starring the marvellous Tilda Swinton but still, "The Man Who Cried" has moments of beauty and flashes of brilliance that make it well worth a look. It's messy, patchy, but has intense visual presence, and some memorable scenes.
The casting shows clout for an art-house director Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, John Turturro, and so on. But greatest praise goes to Oleg Yankovsky as Ricci's father, and the luminous Claudia Lander-Duke, playing his daughter as a child, cast adrift in the world, yet with a stately inscrutability quite beyond her years.
The visual tone is sumptuous, well matched by music which doesn't simply exist outside of the film, but is woven into its very texture. Potter is on surest ground in the worlds of music, dance, theatre, with vivid imagery and impressive tableaux. Her dialogue: not so great. Thankfully Ricci's Susie is more likely to sing than to talk: she is our ears and eyes in a journey through an unsafe, lonely world of the 30s and 40s, and her remarkable face speaks eloquently of sadness and ennui, loss and damage. Depp reprises his now patented gypsy/pirate/outcast role, sidelined as a character, but adding much needed sex appeal. He becomes just another adventure for Susie, emerging and receding from the gloom in a slow dance - but elegant and handsome, like the film.
I'll not forget the scenes of a man dancing in a Parisian café; or Ricci singing, dirge-like, on a doomed liner. I'd like to forget Depp at the climax of his romantic brush with Ricci, riding pointless circles around her on a white horse in slow motion, like something out of a 1980s Kate Bush video.
Not one of the greats; but with glimpses of something altogether better. Still, I'd rather see an odd, flawed gem, than a ploddingly efficient, unoriginal work, showing little imagination or passion.
The casting shows clout for an art-house director Christina Ricci, Cate Blanchett, Johnny Depp, John Turturro, and so on. But greatest praise goes to Oleg Yankovsky as Ricci's father, and the luminous Claudia Lander-Duke, playing his daughter as a child, cast adrift in the world, yet with a stately inscrutability quite beyond her years.
The visual tone is sumptuous, well matched by music which doesn't simply exist outside of the film, but is woven into its very texture. Potter is on surest ground in the worlds of music, dance, theatre, with vivid imagery and impressive tableaux. Her dialogue: not so great. Thankfully Ricci's Susie is more likely to sing than to talk: she is our ears and eyes in a journey through an unsafe, lonely world of the 30s and 40s, and her remarkable face speaks eloquently of sadness and ennui, loss and damage. Depp reprises his now patented gypsy/pirate/outcast role, sidelined as a character, but adding much needed sex appeal. He becomes just another adventure for Susie, emerging and receding from the gloom in a slow dance - but elegant and handsome, like the film.
I'll not forget the scenes of a man dancing in a Parisian café; or Ricci singing, dirge-like, on a doomed liner. I'd like to forget Depp at the climax of his romantic brush with Ricci, riding pointless circles around her on a white horse in slow motion, like something out of a 1980s Kate Bush video.
Not one of the greats; but with glimpses of something altogether better. Still, I'd rather see an odd, flawed gem, than a ploddingly efficient, unoriginal work, showing little imagination or passion.