.■■11■1■ 1=1 At The Movies ood • spirits • `House Of Sand And Fog' In his feature-film debut, director Vadim Perelman explores the American Dream gone horribly awry. Winter Hours: NAOMI PFEFFERMAN Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles Tuesday-Friday: Lunch and Dinner Saturday: Dinner Sunday: Brunch & Dinner 17546 Woodward Ave. (2 blocks north of McNichols) 313-865-0331 T Detroit :Closed Monday • Enter rear • Valet parking wt Citero-tainere/ etAt; tYtit 27925 Goff Pointe Blvd. Farmington Hills, MI 48331 (on 12 Mile between Halsted & Haggerty) 248.489.9400 Open for lunch weekdays Open for dinner 7 nights a week 787510 ■ BBO Grill on the Table ■ Best Sushi Bar in Town ■ Traditional Floor Sitting Rooms Available ■ Free Karaoke 9:00 p.m. with dining or drinking r I 10% off I your TOTAL food bill 1111 I Dine in only ew S co uf. ANY TIME •4 ■ Not good with any other offer expires 1131104 I G arden Authentic Korean & Japanese Cuisine Phone (248) 827-1600 www.newseoulgarden.com newseoul@hotmail.com Open Daily Catering Available 8 27566 Northwestern Hwy. q Wedding And Party Specialists Flowers For All Occasions G SI OF NATURE TATE T FLOWERS (248) 559-5424 (888) 202-4466 Fax: (248) 5595426 29115 Greenfield, Southfield, MI 48076 12/26 2003 76 V 634370 he day before he discovered the-novel House of Sand and Fog in 2001, Vadim Perelman asked his chauf- feur to drive him to a slum in subur- ban Rome. Perelman, a successful commercial director, was in Italy on an AT&T shoot. But he wanted to return to the tenement that had been his home when he arrived from Kiev with his mother in 1977. The Jewish emigre hoped to revisit the decrepit flat where they had lived without glass in the windows and with dead animals in the-street. He wanted to see the room in which he had lain deathly ill, treated by a veterinarian because a doctor was too expensive. He wanted to walk the streets where he had pumped gas for change, guarding his turf against vicious gang members. "I almost died there, many times," he said. So when his chauffeur refused to drive him deep into the slum that day in 2001, Perelman, now 40, walked the 10 blocks alone to his old build- ing. He found his former landlady and silently sat in her apartment, under a naked light bulb, as she served him a glass of rancid wine. As he got up to leave, he placed $5,000 on the rickety table. "I felt like I was giving the money to her, but I was also giving it to myself, back then," he said with emotion. "I was seeing this 14-year-old boy lying there with his throat closed off, having the vet cut into it just to keep him alive. And I walked out of that place like I was walking on air. I felt like I had closed one of the circles of my life — and there was a gift at the end." The "gift" was Andre Dubus III's best- seller House of Sand and Fog, which Perelman bought at the Rome airport, and which revolves around another set of desperate people and a rundown home. The story tells of recovering drug addict Kathy Nicolo, who is evicted from her Northern California bunga- low as the result of a bureaucratic error. The bungalow is then bought at auc- tion for a pittance by Iranian immigrant Col. Massoud Behrani, a former aristo- crat reduced to working menial jobs to support his wife, Nadi, and their son. For Behrani, the house represents a last shot at the American Dream. "I read the novel on the plane and I wept," Perelman said. "I immediately knew I had to turn it into a movie." Like the book, the film, which stars Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley, "is about loneliness and being cast out," he added. "[It's] about being an immigrant in a new country and, with regard to Kathy, about feeling like an immigrant in your own country." Perelman brought his Russian aes- thetic to the melodrama: "It's a great, operatic tragedy," he said. As the intense director told his life story over steak salad at a cafe near his Hancock Park, Calif., home, it sounded like the stuff of melodrama. Until he was 14, he lived in Ukraine, with eight relatives in a one-room Kiev apartment, sharing a bathroom with 60, neighbors. On New Year's Eve when he was 7, his paternal grandfather, "a strong bull of a man, poured himself this giant glass of vodka, toasted us, drank it down, and fell over dead," he recalled. Soon thereafter, Perelman's maternal grandfather, who had survived four heart attacks, summoned him and said, "I'm going to tell you a secret. I'm going to die today." (He did.) The following year, Perelman's grandmother was fatally hit by a street- car, and his father died in a car crash. Seeking a new life, Vadim and his Vadim Perelman has been honored by the National Board of Review with its Best Directorial Debut Award; he also has been nominated for Best First Picture by the Independent Spirit Awards.