FROM THE SHTETL TO HOLLYWOOlt 41 - 11 A STOP
IN OCCUPIED FRANCE, " HE MAN 140 CRIED"
FOLLOWS A JEWISH GIRL JOURNE TO AD00D.
- U H

NAOMI PFEFFER/vIAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

hen Sally Potter was a scrappy
street kid in North London, she
made a horrific discovery
"I stumbled across details of
the concentration camps on a sheet of greasy
paper that some fish and chips had been
wrapped in;" the filmmaker says.
"I wept and wept in terror and incompre-
hension ... I kept wanting it not to be true."
Potter, then 7, wondered how people could be
so cruel. She asked herself if she could have sur-
vived the camps. The questions haunted her for
decades. She has explored them in her most recent
film, The Man Who Cried, which opens today.
The movie tells of Fegele (Christina Ricci), a
little Jewish girl who lives happily with her
father (a cantor) and her grandmother until,
with the threat of pogroms all around them, the
father leaves for America to earn some money
and bring his family over.
When violence does erupt, Fegele's grand-

mother sends her granddaughter
off to America with some fleeing
villagers, but Fegele ends up in
England, living with foster par-
ents who change her name to
Suzie. She isn't permitted to
speak Yiddish, but she is allowed
to sing.
Eventually, hoping to earn
money to go to America and
search for her father, she joins an
opera company in Paris, where
she takes a Gypsy lover (Johnny Depp) — and
braves the Nazis.
The film also stars Cate Blanchett as Suzie's
Russian friend and John Turturro as a vain tenor
and admirer of Mussolini.
While other Holocaust films focus on the
carnage of the Shoah, Potter's movie emphasizes
survival. "The iconography of the Holocaust is
in danger of becoming pornographic," the
writer-director explains, meaning that people
look at the horrific images voyeuristically,
LOST WORLDS on page 72

Above: Filmmaker
Sally Potter: Each of
her heroines is an
outsider who sur-
vive on her wits.

Top: Suzie
(Christina Ricci)
and Cesar (Johnny
Depp), Jew and
Gypsy, two outsiders,
fall in love.