#Atl night spots eye candy full#

Cécile De France is Isabelle, also French, a lesbian and Xavier’s best pal. Audrey Tautou is Martine, the Frenchwoman who was his girlfriend in L’Auberge. Romain Duris returns again as the films’ focal point, Xavier, a French novelist who has a hard time writing novels, maybe because he’s always busy obsessing about the women in his life. It’s like watching François Truffaut’s alter ego, Jean-Pierre Léaud, aging in the four features they made starting with The 400 Blows, or seeing Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy lose their kittenish youth and develop crows’ feet in Richard Linklater’s three Before films. In writer/drector Cédric Klapisch’s follow-up to L’Auberge Espagnole (2002) and Russian Dolls (2005), the best parts come during the credits: we glimpse the lead actors in all three movies, seeing how they change over a decade. He succeeds in making a deeply original, memorable film.Ĭhinese Puzzle, on the other hand, is watchable but forgettable. In his choice of restraint, fablelike simplicity, pared-down dialogue, comedy and sorrow, director Pawlikowski ( My Summer of Love) seems to know exactly the effect he wants. The smitten fellow says, “You’ve no idea of the effect you have, do you?” She lets her hair down, literally, and learns to appreciate jazz - and the band’s handsome young saxophonist.

The movie’s emotional climax is followed by an extended coda, as we follow Ida for a few days in the city, where she decides if she wants to return to being Sister Anna.

The film’s deadpan humor has a trace of Jim Jarmusch or Aki Kaurismaki, but neither of those filmmakers tend to go to the heartbreaking destination Ida and Wanda are headed: the countryside, to find out, from the good Christian farmers there, what happened to the Jews who populated the place (including Ida’s parents) until World War II. Wanda smokes constantly and drinks behind the wheel their car has to be dragged out of a ditch by horses at one point. What follows is a humorous yet haunted road trip as this embittered former prosecutor and the wide-eyed novice take a road trip together. Anna’s real name is Ida Lebenstein: “So, you are a Jewish nun.” “You wouldn’t’ve been happy with me.” She has yet more blunt truths to share. Why didn’t you take me in as a child? asks Ida. She’s no streetwalker, Wanda, but a former, famous judge, and not one to edit her thoughts. Wanda (Agata Kulesza), a still-lovely woman hardened by age and experience, looks her niece up and down curiously while a man friend finishes dressing in her bedroom. So Anna goes to the city and knocks on her aunt’s ornate Art Deco door. This surprises Anna she was raised as an orphan by the nuns and knew of no living relatives. Anna hasn’t taken her vows yet, and before she does her mother superior insists that she go to meet her aunt, Wanda. The luminous, quiet young woman known as Sister Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska) is first seen with her fellow novitiates, gingerly carrying a lifesized statue of Jesus through the snow to his place of honor on the convent’s grounds. At only 80 minutes, it’s also a testament to the power of cinematic brevity.

#Atl night spots eye candy full#

Screened earlier this year at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and now opening commercially, Pawel Pawlikowski’s lustrously austere Ida is a reminder that black-and-white cinematography can be more stunning than full color. In Ida and Chinese Puzzle, two films by European directors introduce their protagonists to strange new worlds, with very different results.