Toronto: 'Fugitive Pieces'

Writer/director Jeremy Podeswa's adaptation of the acclaimed novel by Anne Michaels is a remarkably bloodless affair. Jakob Boot's story is told in an unstuck-in-time fashion that Podeswa handles competently, cutting early on from his traumatic separation from his family as a young boy in Poland during the Second World War to Jakob as a young man in Canada, completing a book co-credited to an unseen collaborator, and shutting down at the approach of his lively girlfriend Alex (Rosamund Pike, a welcome presence). We learn that Jakob's collab was both his mentor and adoptive father, Athos (Rade Serbedzija, making the most out of what must be a welcome break from playing heavies), a Greek archeologist who found the boy Jakob hiding in a forest and smuggled him out of Poland to the idyllic but still dangerous Greek island Eidos. The adult Jakob is weighed down by his memories, particularly of his piano-playing sister Bella, and by survivor's guilt, and he can't make a go of things with Alex, whose outgoing personality he finds equally oppressive. After their breakup he goes to Eidos to bury Athos' ashes, and as stories from varied phases of his life interweave, he finds some resolution—particularly Michaela (Ayelet Zurer).

At this point in the story, the viewer is likely to think, "Well, see, that was the problem all along—he just needed the right girlfriend." Which is not, I believe, what anyone involved intended. But 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.

Comments

[Ray]

It is in fact a terrific novel--the kind of novel that's so good that I was kind of dismayed to hear someone made a film of it . . . But I'll probably see it anyway, just as I'll go see "Atonement," which also deserved to be left alone as a great novel.