Michael Guillen writes:

With Declan Quinn’s unsteady and restless camera, Jonathan Demme observes the unsteady and restless dynamics of yet another American family traumatized into dysfunction.  Fresh from rehab, Kym (Anne Hathaway, who at her wide-eyed worst looks like Liza Minnelli at her wide-eyed best) veers into the Buchman family’s wedding preparations for sister Rachel (Rosemarie DeWitt).  Appreciative of the flagrant disregard for the rules of formula favored by screenwriter Jenny Lumet (Sidney’s daughter), Demme and Quinn endeavor to emulate Lumet’s heedlessness by creating “the most beautiful home movie ever made.” But—as ever—beauty is in the bereft gaze of the beholder.

By refusing to not direct the movie tightly, never rehearsing before filming, rarely planning a shot in advance, and striving for a documentary feel that keeps the spontaneity factor as alive as possible, Jonathan Demme proves just how self-serving spontaneity can be.  Believing he has channeled the spirit of Robert Altman in his portrayal of complex, not thoroughly likeable characters who nonetheless inspire concern, I care about as much as I can for any messed-up family that is not my own.  I’m certainly embarrassed when they’re out of control and hurting each other in public, bludgeoning each other with unbridled honesty and shaming recriminations.

Director Jonathan Demme

Anne Hathaway as Kym

Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel

Left to Right: Anne Hathaway as Kym, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel

Left to Right: Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, Anne Hathaway as Kym

Left to Right: Anne Hathaway as Kym, Anna Deavere Smith as Carol

Left to Right: Anne Hathaway as Kym, Tunde Adebimpe as Sidney, Rosemarie DeWiktt as Rachel, Mather Zickel as Kieran

Jerome LePage as Andrew, Debra Winger as Abby, Anne Hathaway as Kym

Debra Winger as Abby

Bill Irwin as Paul

Mather Zickel as Kieran

Left to Right: Mather Zickel as Kieran, Anne Hathaway as Kym, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, Tunde Adebimpe as Sidney

Left to Right: Debra Winger as Abby, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, Anne Hathaway as Kym

Left to Right: Anisa George as Emma, Rosemarie Dewitt as Rachel

Left to Right: Bill Irwin as Paul, Anna Deavere Smith as Carol

Jonathan Demme

Left to Right: Anne Hathaway as Kym, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel

Left to Right: Tunde Adebimpe as Sidney, Anne Hathaway as Kym, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel

Left to Right: Tunde Adebimpe as Sidney, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel

Left to Right: Jerome LePage as Andrew, Debra Winger as Abby

Debra Winger as Abby

Left to Right: Debra Winger as Abby, Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel, Anne Hathaway as Kym

Jonathan Demme writes:

i was involved in documentary work when sidney lumet suggested
that i read his daughter jenny’s screenplay about family and other
things. i loved jenny’s flagrant disregard for the rules of formula, her lack of
concern for making her characters likable in the conventional sense,
and for what i considered to be her bold approach to truth, pain and
humor. i saw that a film could be made from this script that could
mirror my reaction to reading it - - - that to our own surprise, at
a certain point as the story unfolds, despite the script’s refusal to try
to manipulate the reader’s emotions, we become part of this problematic
family and care very much about its members.
i had wanted to work with anne hathaway since watching her in a crowd
at a screening five years earlier, already being an admirer of her appearances so far in the movies i’d seen. i was able to pump up the nerve to ask debra winger to be in the picture because we had met several times at a film center close to both our homes. bill irwin is a dear friend and a neighbor, and one of my favorite actors of all time. rosemarie DeWitt was suggested by our casting directors, and all of us immediately wanted her very badly to play rachel.
declan quinn and i felt that the film should try to look like "the most beautiful home movie ever made", as though every scene was captured on digital by a friend with a camera, or even by the ghost of a character whose death haunts this family.
because declan and i had such a good experience filming "jimmy carter man from plains" together, we decided to take as documentary-like an approach as we could to "rachel", consistent with this ‘beautiful home movie’ idea. so we never rehearsed before filming, and we rarely planned a shot in advance, preferring to let the actors begin the scene with the knowledge that declan would be responding with the camera in the moment to what was going on. in this way, with no duplicated takes or set-ups, it helped keep the spontaneity factor as alive as possible for the cast.
because i wanted to present the possibility of a really wonderful wedding, there was very little "extras casting" for the movie - - - basically, we created a guest list of people i knew — actors and civilians — that seemed to fit with the couple, and proceeded to let the weekend unfold on film, with everybody getting to know each other as we filmed, in the way people actually become a momentary community at "real-life" special events. 6
at the top of the guest list was a group of musicians who i knew i could count on to create evocative original music in the moment, while we filmed, that would free the movie from the need to have a dramatic background score composed during post-production. several of the musicians, some from palestine and iraq, had played on the score of the jimmy carter film, and donald harrison, jr. is part of a new Orleans family that has been the centerpiece of a documentary project that i’ve been filming there for the past three years.
i was inspired to make ‘rachel getting married’ very much by my love for the films of robert altman, and by other american movies that choose to take an approach that departs from reliable and time-honored ideas about how to fashion story and style in an effort to move the audience.

Production Notes:

About ten minutes into Rachel Getting Married, there’s a moment when Kym (Anne Hathaway), newly returned to the Buchman family home, wanders down an upstairs hall and steps into a sunlit child’s room. Violin music drifts up the stairs from the musicians practicing below. Kym looks around the room for a few seconds, and moves on. Nothing happens—but the moment is powerful.
“I wanted something sad floating through there,” recalls producer/director Jonathan Demme. “I had my headphones on,
looking at the monitor, and Declan was doing this beautiful shot: Kym turns around, starts from the camera, and that was Zafer Tawil’s cue downstairs to start playing. I heard that haunting music and saw Anne’s face respond. I went running after Zafer and said, “Zafer, what was that beautiful tune?” He said, “That’s what I composed for you.” So this rich musical theme was revealed to us as we were making the movie—and to Annie in character as Kym. It was all in the moment and there it is, onscreen.”
That spontaneity—capturing unrehearsed the moody chemistry of Zafer Tawil’s composition, Declan Quinn’s restless camera, and Anne Hathaway’s bereft gaze—was the guiding principle of the Rachel Getting Married production.
“The looseness of Jenny’s script made me feel that this shouldn’t be a tightly directed movie,” says Demme. “At every step of the way, Jenny went to an unexpected place and went further and further off formula and never pulled back. I was really amused and intrigued by the fact that Jenny didn’t try to make you like these characters. They were smart, edgy, irritating and yet halfway through reading the script I felt like I had become part of the family and cared tremendously about all of them.
“There’s terrible trauma in this family, and yet the wedding is beautiful. I wanted Rachel Getting Married to explore both sides of that paradox—the dark struggle, and the celebration of love and family and friends.”
Letting the story unfold
To portray those polarities, Demme, cast and crew took an unconventional approach to every aspect of the film’s production. Long, loosely staged scenes play out accompanied by live music; documentary-style camerawork and editing tell the story; and eminent actors mingle onscreen with movie novices, musicians, artists and dancers in a creative mix.
“We all agreed to let reality happen in front of the cameras without trying to manipulate it from behind the scenes too much. Consistent with that we didn’t do any rehearsals, and nobody, not even Declan, really knew what the shot was going to be until the take started taking shape.”
As lengthy scenes played out from start to finish, Director of Photography Declan Quinn and his camera crew prowled the family home with handheld cameras, capturing on the fly the characters’ exchanges, speeches, big gestures, and small sidelong looks. The action moved forward with few takes and as little obtrusive preparation as possible.
“In the intimate scenes,” says producer Neda Armian, “there would be the main characters in gut-wrenching conversation—and Declan. He was almost like one of the actors, part crew and part cast, relying on his instincts, skill and confidence to know where to point the camera. I like to say this movie has Jonathan’s heartbeat and a lot of Declan’s blood.”
(Or sweat—“That camera was heavy,” remarks Declan Quinn.)
Quinn relates, “The way we worked was very empowering to the cast, and brought the emotions to the surface. Even the crew had to look at things differently, because we all had to be on our toes and react in the moment. As the DP I don’t usually operate the camera myself, but it gave me the freedom to make immediate choices; I tried to see the action as a viewer in the room would—to put the audience in the midst of it.”
During the long wedding party scenes, strategic cameras were literally placed in the actors’ hands to augment the “pro” cameras: Gonzales Joseph, who plays Sidney’s cousin in uniform, is never seen without a small prosumer camera; indie filmmaker Jimmy Joe Roche is the official wedding videographer, and two of the digicam-wielding guests are Demme’s mentor Roger Corman and ace cinematographer Charlie Libin.
A safe zone for dangerous emotions
The unrehearsed, improvisational shooting style suited the story’s emotional high voltage.
“There was such an atmosphere of trust,” says Anne Hathaway, who manages to bring wounded humanity to the unrelentingly difficult character of Kym. “Since we never knew when the camera was on us, the cast had to listen every second, and achieve a very intense level of focus. One of the lessons that the movie teaches—particularly for people in recovery— is how important it is to stay in the present. To be able to stay in character, and hear and react to the music and the scene around you, is very liberating for an actor. To me, this story is about communication and love—and we were given the latitude to explore that.”
“Something happens where you get to work and every corner of the house feels like a house and not a movie set,” says Rosemarie DeWitt, with a nod to production designer Ford Wheeler’s evocative creation of a beautiful and believable family home for the Buchmans.
An oud on the back porch
Like the free-form shooting style, the music was an integral element played out with unconventional freedom.
“For the longest time,” recalls Demme, “I’ve had this desire to try to provide the musical dimension of a movie without traditionally scored music. I thought: wait a minute, in the script, Paul is a music industry bigwig, Sidney’s a record producer, many of his friends will be gifted musicians, so of course there would be nonstop music at this gathering. Following that logic, we have music playing live throughout the weekend, but always in the next room, out on the porch or in the garden.”
Among the legion of musicians, dancers, and performers whom Demme enlisted to fill the ranks of the wedding party, jazz great Donald Harrison, Jr. and Palestinian virtuoso Zafer Tawil, contributed original throughline musical themes and are credited as composers (they also brought along plenty of accompaniment: Harrison‘s Grammy-nominated nephew Christian Scott shows up to jam at the reception, and Tawil is joined by an ensemble of players from the score of Jimmy Carter Man From Plains including Amir ElSaffar.)
“The musicians were encouraged to play whenever they were inspired to, the more the better, never paying attention to the rolling camera,” explains music supervisor and editor Suzana Perić, who has worked on every Demme film since Something Wild. “Musical anarchy on the set. Bliss for the musicians, big headaches for those who had to record them. “
“At one point,” says Demme, “Anne Hathaway was trying to act out a very intense scene while the musicians noodled around outside. She was distracted and the assistant director came to me and said that she was having trouble, so I said “Tell her to do something about it, then.” That’s when Kym yells at them to shut up—all unplanned and improvised but completely in character.”
Finding the unscripted gems
Crediting a lifetime in a complicated, artistic family for her screenplay’s perfect pitch, Jenny Lumet says “I’m a good listener” (and watcher—Sidney Lumet did engage once in a dishwasher-filling race—with Bob Fosse). Improvisation expanded on the script’s strikingly authentic dialogue.
For example, Bill Irwin describes how the actors tuned into “…Storytelling that wasn’t on the page. As scripted, my character Paul and Debra Winger’s character Abby, my ex-wife, hardly exchange any dialogue. But Debra and I followed our instincts, and enlarged that relationship without words, through gestures.” That’s the case when Paul and Abby briefly embrace and then pull apart at the end of their daughter’s wedding—a piercing moment for the viewer.
“There were things in the script that Jenny had written in a very pared-down style,” explains Demme. “At script level the wedding progressed through brief snapshot leaps in time. It was scripted that Sidney would sing a song but Rachel’s vows to Sidney weren’t scripted. I told the actors that they had to take us through a complete wedding, and incidentally, they had to stage it themselves. Rosemarie made up Rachel’s speech herself. Beau Sia, who helped plan the rehearsal dinner and wedding with Rosemarie and Anisa George (Emma), was an unscripted character imposed on the filming by casting Beau—an actor and poet I’ve been dying to work with—as kind of a “wedding czar emcee guy”.”
Rosemarie DeWitt points out, “There are times when you feel like Jonathan’s orchestrating everything and nothing at the same time,” an observation echoed by Bill Irwin: “Sometimes it seems like all he’s doing is smiling and making sure people feel good about work day after day. But he knows what he’s after and gets what he wants.”
Everybody gets their moment
The movie’s big set pieces, such as the rehearsal dinner, the wedding, and the reception dance party, are densely populated with a wide-ranging assemblage of Demme’s friends, family, colleagues, and other energizing personalities (see the following section, Friends, Musicians, and the Community Spirit for a detailed listing of participants).
“Every person, every face in the film is there for a reason,” says Armian. “Jonathan loves real people, and loves working with his friends, which creates a real camaraderie and ease. We were really having a wedding. I wasn’t a producer, I was a wedding planner. And he invited his friends.” Going local, most of the cast and crew were based in the New York area; “People actually went home at night and saw their families,” boasts Armian.
Beyond the fun factor of a convivial set, Demme explains, “One of the conceits of the script was that, despite the drama, the wedding goes great. Let’s face it, the reason you can have a great wedding is because you get a bunch of people together who hit it off and have a great time at a once in a lifetime event. I couldn’t imagine how that could be “acted” by extras, so I felt that the best thing to do would be to get a fantastic group of people together who meet each other the way people will do. If it takes us five days to film the wedding, we’ll film it in continuity and everyone will get to know each other. At the end, when they are partying together, they really should be partying together.”
Parallel gatherings
“Over the weekend,” continues Demme, “there are two different kinds of gatherings going on: people gathering to have fun at the wedding, and other people engaged collectively in the epic struggle against addiction, gathering together to gain strength from that community on a parallel track. We wanted to show maximum respect for that courage and honesty.”
Hathaway sees those qualities in Kym: “I love Kym’s almost compulsive need for honesty,” says Hathaway, “and how direct she is. Her timing may not be appropriate, but she’s trying so hard to get across the chasm of tragedy that separates her from her family. She’s trying every day to choose joy and sobriety. She’s fighting for her place in the family, trying to acknowledge and atone in her own way. At the end, maybe her sister Rachel understands her journey, and that acceptance is crucial.”
For all that it revels in love and friendship—and a great party—Rachel Getting Married is ultimately focused on that emotional honesty, right to the depths of Kym’s eyes as she hears the sad violin music wafting upstairs.

From Sony Classics:

The destiny of a woman caught between love and the law of the underworld.
Lorna, (Arta Dobroshi), a young Albanian woman living in Belgium, has her sights set on opening a snack bar with her boyfriend, Sokol (Alban Ukaj). In order to do so, she becomes an accomplice in a diabolical plan devised by mobster Fabio (Fabrizio Rongione). Fabio has set up a false marriage between Lorna and Claudy (Jérémie Renier) allowing Lorna to get her Belgian citizenship. However, she is then asked to marry a Russian mafioso who’s ready to pay hard cash to also get his hands on those vital Belgian identity papers. Fabio intends to kill Claudy in order to speed up the second marriage. But will Lorna remain silent?
AN INTERVIEW WITH JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE
All your previous movies were set in Seraing, the industrial town where you spent your childhood. This time around, you decided to set your story in Liège, which is a big city.
It’s just a few miles away. We agree that Liège is a bigger city, with plenty of people in the streets during the daytime as well as in the evening. For Lorna, themain character, who comes from Albania, a big European city embodies all sorts of hope. We also wanted to see Lorna in the midst of the crowd, people physically close to her but who knew nothing of her secret.
Unlike your previous movies, which were shot in super 16 mm, this one is shot in 35 mm with a less mobile camera and wider frames. Why did you go for this?
We tested 5 digital cameras, a 35 mm and a super 16 mm. The images shot at night with the 35 mm were closest to our project. Plus, we had decided that this time around, the camera would not be constantly moving, would be less descriptive and would be limited to recording images. Because of its weight the 35 mm was best suited for us.
The main character of your movie, Lorna, is played by an actress from Kosovo. How did you find her?
One of our assistants went to Pristina, Skopje and Tirana in order to audition about one hundred professional and non-professional young actresses. We selected Arta Dobroshi. We had seen her in two Albanian movies a few weeks before. We went to Sarajevo, where she lives, to meet her and we filmed her with our DV camera for a whole day. We filmed her walking, running, singing and also playing in scenes like those in our movie. Then she came over to Liège and we filmed her acting with Jérémie Renier and Fabrizio
Rongione. She was amazingly beautiful and natural. In the evening, before she flew to Sarajevo, we told her that we had selected her for the role of Lorna and that she would have to come back to Belgium a few months before the shooting to rehearse and learn French.
Despite the dramatic dimension of the story, your movie has a sensual and sweet quality.
We owe it to Arta, the actress. Her face, her voice, the way she moves, the way she speaks French with her special accent … and it’s probably because of our camera’s perception of things, and probably because the movie is also a love story.
Interview by William Sobel
ABOUT JEAN-PIERRE AND LUC DARDENNE
The internationally acclaimed filmmaking duo Jean-Pierre (born April 1951) and Luc (born March 1954) Dardenne had directed and produced documentary films for over two decades before turning to writing, directing and producing fiction films.
They founded the company Dérives in 1975, through which they went on to produce over 60 documentaries, including their own. In 1994, they created Les Films du Fleuve, the company that has produced all their fiction films.
1996 marked the Dardenne brothers’ feature film breakthrough with the critically acclaimed release of LA PROMESSE (THE PROMISE) starring Jérémie Renier and Olivier Gourmet, who have both since become regular actors in the Dardenne films. Since then all their films have been selected in the competition of the Cannes International Film Festival. LA PROMESSE was followed by the 1999’s Cannes Film Festival Palme d’Or and critical smash ROSETTA, starring Emilie Dequenne and Olivier Gourmet. In addition to the Palme d’Or ROSETTA garnered the Cannes Film Festival Best Actress Award for Ms. Dequenne in her debut performance. THE SON (LE FILS) won Olivier Gourmet the Best Actor Award at Cannes in 2002. For L’ENFANT, (a Sony Pictures Classics release), the Dardennes won their second Palme d’Or in 2005. LORNA’S SILENCE, won the Cannes International Film Festival’s Best Screenplay Award in 2008. Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne belong to a rare group of filmmakers, including Bille August, Francis Ford Coppola and Emir Kusturica, who have won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or twice.

Creators of intensely naturalistic films, brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne have created an extraordinary body of work, which places them among the world’s most respected filmmakers. The Dardennes’ films are stark portrayals of young people at the fringes of society – among them immigrants, the unemployed, and the homeless.
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne were born and raised in Seraing, near Liege, the “French-speaking region of Belgium that provides the gritty, postindustrial landscape so omnipresent in many of their films” (Emilie Bickerton, Cinéaste Magazine). Jean-Pierre studied drama while Luc studied philosophy. In 1975 they established Dérives, the production company that produced the roughly sixty documentary films they made before branching into feature films. The tone and subject matter of their documentaries reflect much of the same territory the brothers would revisit with their narrative films: immigration, World War II resistance, a general strike in 1960.
LA PROMESSE (The Promise) is the story of Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who operates a tenement that he rents out to immigrant workers with the help of his fifteen-year old son Igor (Jérémie Renier). When Hamidou, a laborer from Burkina Faso, dies (as a direct result of Roger’s unscrupulousness), Igor takes responsibility for Hamidou’s wife and baby. The film … “shows us the birth of a consciousness,”(Gavin Smith, Film Comment) and its setting – a Western Europe full of entrepreneurs desperate to grab their share of a quickening economy, and foreign laborers even more desperate to taste a small piece of
that – is both grim and hopeful. The opportunities the film presents may be more spiritual than material, but this is in keeping with the hardscrabble reality of the Dardennes’ films. In his review of LA PROMESSE Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic noted that, “The Dardenne brothers… have confessed to a burden. They believe in hope. They insist that under the frenzy of our world, physical and moral, there is quiet.”
With ROSETTA, the Dardennes turned their focus to the burdens – philosophical, spiritual, psychological – of unemployment. Émilie Dequenne, who had never before acted in film and was awarded the Best Actress Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, is the title character, a young woman living with her alcoholic mother in a trailer park. The film is about Rosetta’s search for purpose and to her, purpose can only be found through work. She makes her way through Seraing’s fringes for the most menial of positions; she catches fish in the muddy, murky stream by her trailer park. Her goal is no greater than to be a cook at a waffle stand but according to Gavin Smith, “she hurtles through [the film] as if she would crash through a brick wall in search of a job.” Ultimately it isn’t societal forces or a capitalist system that derails Rosetta but her own singular desire. “Rather than personify or dramatize social forces arrayed against her, this Darwinian study suggests that Rosetta’s oppression is rooted as much in her internalization of dog-eat-dog capitalism as in her unpitying environment.” Rosetta was the first Belgian film ever to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, coming in ahead of films by David Lynch, Pedro Almodovar, Takeshi Kitano, and Raoul Ruiz. The film’s impact was not only cinematic: a labor law designed to protect young workers like Rosetta was passed shortly after the film’s release. “’[I]t was pure chance,’ Jean-Pierre insists. ‘There was already a bill going through, and the minister took advantage of our award to call it the Rosetta Law. But we never intended to get laws changed.’ Luc adds: ‘Of course, we always hope our films will speak to people, disturb them, but we never hoped to change the world’.” (Sheila Johnstone, The Independent)
The practice of work is also central to THE SON (LE FILS), a deceptively complex movie about revenge and redemption. The film, like all of the Dardennes’, seems straightforward enough: Olivier, a carpenter (played by Olivier Gourmet, who, like Duquenne, earned an acting prize at Cannes), takes on a young man named Francis as an apprentice. Francis is newly released from juvenile detention, and Olivier slowly discovers that Francis played a part in the death of his son some years earlier. Francis is unaware of the connection he shares with Olivier, and the Dardennes’ use this asymmetrical relationship to investigate the ideas of forgiveness and vindication. “For all its quasi-documentary materialism, THE SON is ultimately a Christian allegory of one man’s inchoate desire to return good for evil,” says J. Hoberman in The Village Voice. THE SON is something of a departure from the Dardennes’ earlier work: it’s not the sort of movie that gets labor legislation named after it. Olivier’s carpentry is observed with unstinting and careful detail; it is not a means for sustenance but a means for existence. According to A.O. Scott of The New York Times, “It is hardly surprising that the Dardennes put together their naturalist fable with such a fanatical, self-effacing sense of craft. They are obsessed with work in the way that some of their European counterparts are obsessed with sex: the textures and rhythms of manual labor are, for them, at once irreducibly physical and saturated with an almost spiritual significance.”
Crimes and occupations again figure prominently in the Dardennes’ fourth film, L’ENFANT (The Child), but this time the two are bound up in ways both expected and surprising. After a young woman named Sonia (Deborah Francois) gives birth, she leaves the hospital and finds her apartment has been sublet. She finds Bruno (Jérémie Renier), her equally young boyfriend, the baby’s father and a petty thief with no real understanding of fatherhood. He uses the baby as a prop in panhandling and to get a bed for a night in a shelter; he comes into a bit of money and uses it to buy an expensive jacket for Sonia – to match his own. Bruno then makes a decision that seems ghastly and sensational, but as handled by the Dardennes seems matter-of-fact and calm: he sells the baby. We follow Bruno and the child on an excruciatingly long bus trip to the city’s outskirts where he will rendezvous with his traffickers – who or what they are is left mostly unsaid. “Like the Dardennes’ close framing and tracking, their use of ambient light and sound, [the slow pacing is] a way of clinging to the character and feeling the moral weight of his actions, even when he does not. That’s why it’s possible to care about inept, thoughtless Bruno, and care deeply, when at last he, too, feels the gravity” (Stuart Klawans, The Nation). Of course it’s not possible for Bruno’s efforts to get the baby back not to have ramifications – for himself, for Sonia, for a young accomplice (in one classically "Dardenne" scene, we see Bruno’s accomplice, barely a teenager, plotting a crime in work overalls at his vocational school). As for Igor in THE SON, redemption for Bruno is as much a psychological act as a physical one. The film earned the Dardennes the Palme d’Or from Cannes, their second in seven years.
On their latest film, LORNA’S SILENCE (LE SILENCE DE LORNA), Luc Dardenne stated, "[It's] about a young woman who has every reason to be desperate and who continues to believe that everything is possible. A religious believer of sorts, even if God is dead [...] How can a woman who doesn’t believe in God believe everything is possible? Where does this crazy hope come from? She is strange, out-of-the-ordinary. A fictional character always swims against the tide"(Anne Feuillere, CineEuropa).
Mirroring the consistency of their setting, the Dardenne brothers maintain a regular stable of collaborators (for all of their films the brothers share writing and directing credits), most notably cinematographer Alain Marcoen and editor Marie-Helene Dozo. Jérémie Renier played both Igor in LA PROMESSE, Bruno in L’ENFANT and Claudy in LORNA’S SILENCE, while Olivier Gourmet, the main character of THE SON, has a brief cameo as a detective in L’ENFANT. Like Rosetta’s Emilie Duquenne, Deborah Francois, the seventeen-year old lead in L’ENFANT, was appearing in her first film.
Luc Dardenne has described their process of working with actors as follows: “What we do with the actors is also very physical. The day filming begins we do not feel obliged to do things exactly the way they were rehearsed; we pretend that we are starting over from zero so that we can rediscover things that we did before. The instructions we give the actors are above all physical. We start working without the cameraman–just the actors and my brother and me. We walk them through the blocking, first one then the other, trying several different versions. They say but do not act their lines. We do not tell them what the tone of their lines should be; we just say that we will see once the camera is
rolling. At this point there is no cameraman, no sound engineer, no lighting. Then we set up all the camera movements exactly and the rhythm of the shot, which is usually a long take. Doing it this way allows us the ability to modify the actors’ movements or any small details” (Emilie Bickerton, Cinéaste Magazine).

From Sony Classics:

"I’VE LOVED YOU SO LONG" is a film about the strength of women, their capacity to shine forth, reconstruct themselves and be reborn. A story about our secrets, about confinement, about the isolation we all share…."
- Philippe Claudel
SYNOPSIS
Léa (Elsa Zylberstein) and Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) are sisters. The film begins with Léa, the younger sister by fifteen years, picking Juliette up at the airport. We soon realize that the two sisters are almost complete strangers to each other. Juliette has just been released from prison after serving a long sentence. Léa was still a teenager when Juliette, a doctor, was convicted of the murder of her six-year-old son. Léa contacted Juliette when she was released and suggested that Juliette come to live with her. Juliette had no particular desire to see her sister again.
Luc (Serge Hazanavicius), Léa’s husband, is quite reserved, almost hostile, about Juliette’s presence under their roof. Luc and Léa have two adopted Vietnamese daughters, who are 8 and 3 years old. Luc’s father, Papy Paul (Jean-Claude Arnaud) also lives in the house. He’s a charming old man who spends all of his time reading since a stroke deprived him of the power of speech.
Life together isn’t easy to begin with. Juliette has to relearn certain basics. The world has moved on and she often seems confused. Although she may seem cold and distant, her attitude stems more from her being ill at ease. Helped by some, such as the kindly but tactless social worker and her open-hearted but depressed parole officer (Frédéric Pierrot) whose confidante she becomes, Juliette is also rejected by others, particularly employers who throw her out as soon as they find out what she did.
Léa’s attitude is ambiguous. She avoids talking about Juliette’s terrible crime and time in prison at all costs. She wants nothing to blunt the happiness of their reunion and getting to know each other again. Luc mentions it reproachfully, as does Juliette in a different way.
Gradually, the real Juliette emerges. She opens up to the world once more, thanks to her two nieces, with whom she becomes very close after being very stiff with them at the beginning, and Michel (Laurent Grevill), a friend of Léa’s, and Papy Paul, who, in a more symbolic way, knows what it’s like to be locked away. Juliette gets a job as a medical secretary at the local hospital on the condition that she never mentions she used to be a doctor. Her relationship with Léa becomes much stronger and more intimate. Even Luc succeeds in pushing his preconceptions to one side and seeing Juliette as his sister-in-law, not as a murderer.
But a huge questions hangs over Juliette’s renaissance. Why did she do such a terrible thing fifteen years ago? For all the others, it’s a recurrent thought that they dare not put into words. And for Juliette, locked away in her secret, it’s a burden to bear, which holds her back from engaging in her life and believing that she too has the right to be happy.

INTERVIEW WITH PHILIPPE CLAUDEL:
You’ve had great success with books and received many a prestigious literary prize. Why a first film after all these novels?
Whether they are born of words, film or paintings - I painted a great deal at a certain period in my life - images have always interested me. I love deepening our view of the world with them, illuminating it, questioning it through their intermediary, and bestowing on it a reflection. I’ve always been a film buff. When I was studying literature and history at the University of Nancy in the early 80s, we made many shorts. We were always behind or in front of the camera, screenwriters, cameramen, actors and film editors alike. I already was writing a lot at the time, but I also had a real desire to create and show images. Then the cinema came back into my life with Yves Angelo, whom I met in 1999, when Meuse l’oubli, my first novel, was published. He asked me to work with him. Our first collaboration, the screenplay for “At My Fingertips” became a film, which he directed and was released in 2002. Following that, I met producers. They ordered screenplays from me but proved unable to make them. Then came the great adventure of “Grey Souls”: Yves wanted to make a film out of it. I wrote the screenplay, and he was nice enough to involve me in the project: scoutings, casting, readings with actors… He awoke in me a desire to have more control over a creation, until the very end. I was waiting for a deep desire and an important story to me to step up to direction. It’s very complicated making a film, it requires so much energy, time and money. It’s far more exhausting than writing. For a novel, I write it wherever I want and stop whenever I want. But when the motion-picture machine starts up, it can’t be stopped. It’s necessary to have - and here I speak for myself - a subject which profoundly inhabits us, to be able to bear it all, so that the desire remains intact, flamboyant and vital. Which happily was the case with this story.
Did it seem obvious to you not to make a novel out of it?
Ah, but of course. There was a clear separation in my mind. When bits and snatches of a story come to me, I immediately know if it’s going to be for the cinema or a novel. When producers sometimes ask me if I would accept to novelize the script of a film they weren’t able to make I answer no. I’d be incapable of it. And it would be of no interest whatsoever. But I make use of my talents as a novelist: my desire was, as for my books, to make a film which can touch different audience categories. Some people will see in it the story of two sisters trying to become close once again, while others will be more interested in the theme of incarceration. Some will focus on the rebirth of a woman, while others will watch the life of a family confronted with the unspoken, dark secrets… One can have a simplified reading of it, or one far more intellectual.
I’ve always loved books or films which are aimed at the greatest number, which aren’t intended solely for a single audience.
What was your starting point? The story of these two sisters? Did the recurring themes such as confinement and rebirth come next? Or did everything occur at once?
This story allowed me to crystalize scattered elements, such as confinement or secrets, which I had already tried to explore in my texts. One of my novels Quelques-uns des cent regrets, which appeared in 2000, already focused on a secret between son and mother. I’m fascinated by the principle of hidden life, that other who isn’t quite who we believe they are, or who hasn’t done what we think they did. Next, the theme of confinement is close to my heart: I taught at a prison
for eleven years. Then I wanted to write a story whose central characters were women. I haven’t yet made it into a novel. I love women, I’m fascinated by their strength and capacity to stand upright, no matter what happens, and be reborn, support us and put up with us, the miserable men that we are. That has always struck me. It seems to me that men quickly subside, while women are something else. I imagined the story of these two sisters, Juliette and Léa, whom life separated for fifteen years before they meet anew. All this came together very rapidly. I quickly wrote an outline of the script in a notebook, then I left to travel in Lapland. Over there, in the winter, the nights are endless, while the day lasts barely two hours. That was a magic moment of writing. I returned in January with a screenplay which turned out to be virtually identical to the final shooting script. Everything was there, right in place, almost supernaturally. It was the very first time it’s ever happened to me.
Did you think immediately of the actresses? Kristin Scott Thomas, for example?
No not immediately. In any event, not when writing. I first thought of Elsa to play Léa. I knew her a little in life, I wanted to do something with her. I’ve always loved that blend of joy and immense fragility she gives off. As for Kristin, she’s a tremendous actress but who in French cinema has always appeared to me as underused, so I sent her the script. She really loved it, and, most importantly, she had the courage and intelligence to throw herself into the role of Juliette, which wasn’t totally obvious. The first time I met her, I told her that I’d like her to be less beautiful on screen. I know how easy it is to gradually fall apart in prison. Inmates gradually take on the colour of walls, both inside and out. The walls become their clothing, their skin, their souls. It’s very rare to be able to retain one’s strength, one’s inner light and desires. It was vital to show this. I next took great care in composing the rest of the casting. I wanted actors who weren’t worn out either by the cinema or by fame, yet who remained great talents and who could lend truth to the characters.
Three actors who have the important roles in the film- like Laurent Grévill, Serge Hazanavicius or Frédéric Pierrot, aren’t big stars either. So they’re only all the more credible.
Laurent Grévill plays Michel. He’s without a doubt the character closest to me in life. He taught in prison, just like me. He was once in love with a girl of whom he saw a kind of double in a painting hanging in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nancy. This last story belongs to me. It was important for me that Laurent didn’t have the physical appearance of seducer. I wasn’t going to put in front of Kristin an actor looking like someone into whose arms she would obviously fall. I wanted someone who had a secret charm, someone who wasn’t necessarily "handsome" at first sight, who could even be downright unpleasant, and who gradually bares himself, who becomes touching, and who reveals himself to be someone too has been an outcast, in the same way as Juliette. And so both of them, little by little begin to reconstruct something, without going too quickly for all that. The only tender gesture between them takes place at the very end, when she puts a hand on his shoulder as they come out of the museum.
He’s also the only one of the entire bunch of friends to quickly guess Juliette’s secret.
Because he was used to meeting women like her when he’d go to the prison. He belongs to that brotherhood of those men and women who have been destroyed. Lost souls recognise each other, I believe. In the same way, the character of Captain Fauré, played by Frédéric Pierrot, is likewise
Juliette’s double. Frédéric Pierrot is an actor who possesses great humanity. He’s a beautiful person and an actor who gives off uncommon force. Fauré, like Juliette, reveals a fractured humanity. He’s without a doubt one of the characters who touches me most. Juliette is helped by all the characters. They draw her back to the side of life. They put back her on the side of light. They teach her all over again trust and the gestures of happiness. But Juliette doesn’t do for Fauré what the others do for her. Their relationship raises the question of the good or bad we can do someone, unintentionally, without knowing it, through a gesture we make, or a word we utter or not. Sometimes we realize this only years later. Juliette isn’t guilty for what happens to Fauré, but she might feel responsible, not having known how to answer him at the right time. They are very close, one is like the double of the other.
Awkward?…
In part, yes, from the point of view of intimate feelings, yes, but not in his human relationship with Juliette. Unlike his role as policeman might give one to suppose, he never judges her. Others at the beginning don’t dare to speak to Juliette or ask her questions. Furthermore some make hasty judgements about her, which is human too, in the end. As for Fauré, he behaves normally with Juliette, quite like with Little Lys, Léa’s daughter, who asks her the very questions the others dare not. This child is in a sense their spokeswoman, without them daring to admit it. She has all the naturalness and spontaneity of childhood in her insatiable curiosity.
What about Luc, Elsa’s husband, played by Serge Hazanavicius?
He reacts to Juliette as many people would. As I too might react, no doubt. If he appears at the beginning almost unpleasant, you have to put yourself in his shoes. His wife asks him to take into his apartment, their home, a sister-in-law he’s never met and who’s just spent 15 years in prison. Luc represents the way many people look upon those who’ve just come out of prison.
At the beginning, we don’t know if he’s obnoxious by nature or if it’s just an attitude around Juliette.
With Luc, Léa and their children, I wanted to set up a kind of "happy family”. They seem happy enough, they have two adorable little girls, a pretty, comfortable house. Luc’s father lives with them as well, an elderly mutist, but one who’s ever smiling, ever reassuring, a kind of well-anchored rock on which the family rests. To all appearances, it’s the ideal family. And then we gradually realize that that things aren’t working quite as well as all that. And the unspoken resurfaces when Juliette moves into their home. A couple, Léa/Juliette, forms, yet to the detriment of the real couple. We understand that they hardly ever make love anymore. Léa thinks only of this sister whom life once snatched from her and who has now returned as if out of the blue. When she and her husband kiss romantically in the street, we have the feeling that something has been reborn between them. Moreover, in the story, two couples, from the point of view of trust and harmony, are reborn in parallel: Luc and Léa, on the one hand, and the two sisters, on the other. Why is there only the appearance of happiness? Juliette’s incarceration and the family taboos which accompanied her, have completely destroyed her younger sister, in her life as adolescent, then next in her life as woman, wife and mother. But nevertheless everything starts to move and change once again when Juliette resurfaces. Juliette evolves but, thanks to her,
everybody around her evolves as well. Change takes place slowly. I couldn’t film it in fast motion. Life is sometimes slow.
Moreover, the film is constructed in light touches, a job cut out for a novelist?
The story is voluntarily impressionistic. I write novels like filmmaker, but I write films like novelist. Readers often tell me that my novels are highly visual. Here, it’s just the opposite, I adapted novelistic techniques to the image. I wanted that rhythm. That particular advance in the story which proceeds more by juxtaposition than by linear progression. I wanted to remain on faces, and give the actors and actresses the time to express their character’s inner self. The choice of framing and rhythm of editing was key as well. I’m fed up with today’s "pulsating" cinema, with its ultra rapid editing, bombarding us with images and cameras swirling about in every direction. I think it’s important to learn over again waiting, patience, and even seeing.
Kristin Scott Thomas’s face is impressive. She expresses so many things without a word. Yet, at the same time, she’s secret, mysterious.
Kristin has great talent, and, at the same time, the role was written so that the character is thus. There’s was a wonderful balance between her talent and the character she had to play. Elsa is just as impressive. That awkwardness which she gives off, that false cheerfulness, that smiling face but which constantly threatens to crack under the onslaught of tears. Framing and camera mobility also influence the evolution of the characters: Juliette’s character, for example, is forced first of all into tight frames, which shut up and imprison. Next I widened the angle as if she were returning to the world. At the outset and during a whole part of the film, the camera on Juliette is always fixed, insistent, while the camera on others is lighter, more mobile.
In this film, you explore all sorts of family ties. First and foremost, the complicity between sisters…
Above all, I try to answer one question: can bonds be recreated after such a long separation? Especially when they were so close and when that closeness between them no longer exists? And if one has this desire, does the other truly share it? I wanted to make this intimate tie felt.
You also address the question of adoption, since the two girls, Clélis and Emélia, are both adopted children. Both come from Vietnam.
We have here of course the theme of secrets, present in more than one respect in the film, in this particular case rather the enigma of one’s origins. And then a question which I wanted to ask: just what is a family? How does one build it? How do we become parents? And from the point of view of the children, just what are parents? There’s also Léa’s ambiguity as she declares at one moment not "to have wanted a child from her belly”. All this obviously reflects the trauma created in her by her sister’s gesture. To play the two children, I chose two little girls with a large difference in age to reflect that separating Juliette from Léa. Shooting Lise Ségur, the oldest, wasn’t a problem, she felt very much at ease and completely natural, but Lys Rose, the youngest, gave us a real headache. Devilishly pretty certainly, but a little devil all the same, who often did just the opposite of what was asked of her… So it took tons of both patience and… candy!
The mother of the two sisters has Alzheimer’s disease, Luc’s father can’t speak anymore, following a brain hemorrhage. Here, once again, did you wish to speak about confinement?
It wasn’t my intention to draft an exhaustive catalogue of confinements, but it’s one of the themes that is of great concern to me in life, and which I attempted to take up with my various characters. The film breaks down this theme into various modes, and different shots, from the prison and its consequences, to old age and Alzheimer’s disease, from the solitude of the divorcee with Captain Fauré, to confinement in the mourning of the character of Michel, secrets we don’t dare to reveal and in which we are walled up. Furthermore, ever since adolescence Léa has stopped growing, so that she’s remained, in a way, cloistered in it.
During the picture, we sense that you’re attentive to even the minutest details, little realistic touches and anecdotes full of humor.
I was highly rigorous when it came to placing the story and characters, as well as the set elements, costumes, make-up and hairstyles. So, I asked Kristin to undergo a physical transformation, to show all the years of incarceration tattooed on Juliette’s face at the opening of the film. At the outset, she doesn’t wear any make-up. So we focused in on her hair, accessories and every tiny detail which might make her all the more credible. When she steps out of prison, she wears a coat which corresponds to her previous life, but it’s far too big because she’s probably lost a lot of weight. She has a grayish complexion, her hair is colorless. She constantly bites her nails. And Juliette smokes, a lot, while Kristin doesn’t smoke at all in real life. I insisted on this point: I didn’t want her to pretend to smoke. If the character smoked, she really had to smoke. I chose for her the very worst cigarettes, bitter and ageless. I wanted there to be in smoking a perceptible disgust, a perceptible addiction. I acted in the same way with Elsa, by constructing the face and silhouette of Léa like those of a teenager who had stopped growing, who would have refused to do so. In real life, Elsa is a young woman who’s always highly elegant, who loves fashion. So I really wanted to break with this image and had her wear clothing that she never would have dreamed of wearing otherwise. I cut out for Jacqueline Bouchard, our wardrobe mistress, models found in the catalogues of department stores such as La Redoute, Cyrillus, H&M and Monoprix. I see too many movies where the houses, even modest ones, are decorated by designers whose work far exceeds the level of life of those who are supposed to live in them, where any middle executive is dressed up in Prada. Not all people can buy themselves immense wardrobes or spend a lot of money on clothing.
The house is a real house of family, full of books…
The fact that the shoot takes place almost entirely in Nancy was for me indispensable. The entire credibility of the project depends on it. For the house, not one single detail of the set was left to chance. I put books I liked on the night tables and shelves. For the film pays tribute to books, and what they can bring to our lives. Luc’s father and Juliette come together over their favorite books, like Sylvie by Nerval, that Juliette read and reread in prison. I was likewise highly attentive to the construction of the architectural lines in the film. Many lines are present, evoking prison bars, a chain hangs from the ceiling, as in an engraving by Piranèse, the stairs, the movement in the house, like so many prison gangways…Everybody might not see it, but I still know it’s there. And then there are curves, rounded shapes, in the swimming pool scenes notably, where gentleness seems to return. For the colors, I went from hard grey to soft grey, from dark to
light. At the beginning the atmospheres are Hitchcockian and cold, only to become softer and warmer later. I spoke a lot about it with Jérôme Alméras, my cinematographer. We had to move little by little towards life.
How did you direct the actresses?
We had two readings together. With Elsa, it was very tactile. I surrounded her, reassured her, took her in my arms, embraced her, a little like an older brother. With Kristin, it was more intellectual, but no less intense. I advised her to read certain books. On the set, at the start, I composed for her kinds of haikus and would slip her little notes. I’d tell her: "Read this a little later, just before you act". I expressed to her sensations. "A droplet which falls on a stone"… "Look at a great empty well"… "The skin of that man’s hands"… Little phrases like that. Next, I stopped all the little notes, I didn’t want to get into a kind of easy habit, and preferred by far speaking with her. Before the scenes to be shot, we reflected out loud about the way she was going to play this woman, what she was thinking about, etc. Kristin and Elsa brought many ideas and suggestions as well.
What about the music? It gives rhythm to the film, it’s highly important. Even the title, drawn from a child’s song.
I wanted offbeat pieces, without a piano, just an acoustic and electric guitar. Jean-Louis Aubert, who’s an artist I’ve long admired, and a good friend over the past few years, composed a music imprinted with poetry, a kind of a mental music which accompanies the evolution of Juliette’s character. He’s a man who has both a child’s sensitivity and rare human delicacy. He liked both the subject and characters. I asked him to pass by the shoot as well. He came with his guitar and impregnated himself with the atmosphere. He sang for me, between two takes, a song by Barbara, "Quand reviendras-tu?" I instantly knew that this would be the theme music for the end credits. For the rest of the film, Jean-Louis recorded one full hour of music, blending variations on the theme of "Alter ego", a song he wrote that I love, and I asked him to rework some original compositions and one unreleased song in particular that I knew "Je t’attends", having heard it sung in a studio. And then, he enjoyed himself with the lullaby "A la claire fontaine". The song is part of our heritage. Whenever we sing these words, "I’ve loved you for so long", everybody immediately thinks: "Never shall I forget you". In the end, Jean-Louis gave me his music just before the end of the shoot. I had given him the dailies, pre-edited fragments and atmospheres so that he could work on them in parallel on his side.
Are you satisfied with your film?
I did, in the end and thanks to all those who worked with me, exactly I wanted to: telling a strong, sensitive, sincere story, optimistic despite its tragic starting point; a story about life which leads the central characters back towards light, rebirth, love and understanding. I hope that this film will help the people who’ll see it become closer to others, and accept them such as they are, without judging them, and help them when they need it most, that is to say, always. I hope that it’s a film of love, imprinted with humanity, and whose emotion will long endure in the hearts of the audience.

From Sony Classics:

Director’s Notes:
In the winter of 1992, someone suggested that I make a film adaptation of Louis Cha’s famous martial-arts novel The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. I re-read all four volumes of it and finally decided not to do an adaptation but instead to develop a new story about the early years of two of its main characters, Dongxie (Lord of the East) and Xidu (Lord of the West). In the book, both of them appear only in old age. I chose these two because they have exactly opposite personalities; you could think of one as the antithesis of the other.
Martial-arts fiction has a long history in Chinese literature. It has generally been most popular in times of turmoil, such as during the civil war at the turn of the 20th century, or during the Sino-Japanese War, or in Hong Kong during the 1950s. This could be because the world in which the stories are set, the jianghu, is imaginary, and it’s a world in which values exist only in their absolute forms. It’s also a world in which the only law is the law of the sword. And the stories are about heroes.
I tried to depart a little from the traditional martial-arts genre. Instead of treating these characters as heroes, I wanted to see them as ordinary people – at the stage before they became heroes.
There’s also one significant difference between ASHES OF TIME and my other films. I generally start with the beginning of a story or with certain characters, and then gradually work out where the story is going and where it’s going to end as the shoot goes on. In this case, though, I knew where these characters were going to end up and there was nothing I could do to change it. This imbued both me and the film with a sense of fatalism. Now that the film is finished and I try to reflect on the whole experience of making it, I find myself remembering some lines from the Buddhist canon and I’ve decided to use them to preface the film: “The flag is still. The wind is calm. It’s the heart of man that is in turmoil!”
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that there are several different versions of ASHES OF TIME in circulation, some approved by me, some not, as well as the fact that the film was never released in much of the world including the United States. To rectify this situation, we decided to revisit this project and to create the definitive version.
As we launched into the work, we discovered that the original negatives and sound materials were in danger: the laboratory in Hong Kong where they were stored was suddenly shut down, without warning. We retrieved as much as we could, but the negatives were in pieces. As if we were searching for a long-lost family, we began looking for duplicate materials from various distributors and even the storage vaults of overseas Chinatown cinemas. As this went on, we came to realize that there are hundreds of prints locked up in Chinatown warehouses in those cities which used to show Hong Kong movies. Looking through all this material felt like uncovering the saga of the ups and downs of Hong Kong cinema in the last few decades. And this history, of course, included ASHES OF TIME.

We founded Jet Tone Films in 1992, and ASHES OF TIME was our first production. I always regretted that the way we had to make ASHES OF TIME back then didn’t allow us to achieve the technical standards the film needed. Now, 15 years later, I want to put this right.
Wong Kar Wai (2008)

“The flag is still. The wind is calm. It’s the heart of man that is in turmoil! “
(from the Buddhist cannon)
ASHES OF TIME is inspired by characters from Louis Cha’s martial arts novel The Eagle-Shooting Heroes. It centers on a man named Ouyang Feng. Since the woman he loved rejected him, he has lived in the western desert, hiring skilled swordsmen to carry out contract killings. His wounded heart has made him pitiless and cynical, but his encounters with friends, clients and future enemies make him conscious of his solitude…
Synopsis
The film is set in five parts, five seasons that are part of the Chinese almanac. The story takes place in the jianghu, the world of the martial arts. Ouyang Feng (Leslie Cheung) has lived in the western desert for some years. He left his home in White Camel Mountain when the woman he loved chose to marry his elder brother rather than him. Instead of seeking glory, he ends up as an agent. When people come to him with a wish to eliminate someone who has wronged them, he puts them in touch with a swordsman who can do the job. J I N G Z H E In the Chinese almanac, which divides the year into 24 terms, Jingzhe is the third solar term. It begins when the sun reaches 345 degrees of celestial longitude and ends when it reaches 360 degrees. It refers to a time in spring when the peach blossom flowers begin to bloom and insects come back to life. Every year, as spring approaches and the almanac predicts warmer breezes from the east, Ouyang Feng receives a visit from his friend Huang Yaoshi (Tony Leung Kai Fai). In their younger days, Huang and Ouyang were the two best swordsmen of their generation. Huang is a dashing romantic and a roaming adventurer. Like a sworn ritual, he visits every year at the same time to tell Ouyang tales of his travels of that year.
This year Huang brings a gift for Ouyang – a magic wine, given to him by a woman, which is said to erase the drinker’s memories. Ouyang declines to drink any. But Huang, having drunken the wine himself, leaves abruptly, leaving Ouyang to wonder who the woman is.
Soon after, Huang meets a swordsman (Tony Leung Chiu Wai)in a tavern, and asks him if they knew each other from before. The swordsman replies in the affirmative, and says that the two of them used to be best friends. Huang had previously gone to Peach Blossom Village to attend the swordsman’s wedding, but Huang flirted with the bride (Carina Lau) on their wedding day. Since then, the swordsman has sworn to kill Huang the next time they meet. But despite his oath, the swordsman does not kill Huang Yaoshi that day, for he is turning blind. Huang instead is later wounded in a duel with the Prince of the Murong Clan, who accuses him of jilting his sister. 8
Business is slow for Ouyang Feng. He has only one client this spring. That client is Murong Yang (Brigitte Lin), who commissions the death of Huang Yaoshi. Huang’s crime is that he jilted Murong’s sister Yin; Huang had proposed to marry Yin a year ago but never showed up. Murong wants to administer the deathblow himself, to ensure that Huang dies in excruciating pain. Soon after, Ouyang is confronted by Murong Yin herself. She wants to commission him to organize the murder of her brother Murong Yang. During a hallucinatory night, Ouyang comes to realize that Yin and Yang are two facets of the same troubled soul. The next day, Murong disappears. A rumor later spreads through the jianghu of a mysterious swordsman who duels with his own reflection in the water. X I A Z H I In the Chinese almanac, Xiazhi is the tenth solar term. It begins when the sun reaches 90 degrees of celestial longitude and ends when it reaches 105 degrees. It refers to a time in summer when the influence of ‘yang’ begins to wane and ‘yin’ begins to rise. A peasant girl (Charlie Young) appears outside Ouyang’s shack. She wants to find a swordsman to avenge her brother, but has only a mule and a basket of eggs to offer in payment. Ouyang tells her that he cannot help her without money. The swordsman from Peach Blossom Village arrives. He is fast losing his sight, and wants to go home to see peach blossoms one last time while he can. But he needs money for the journey. Ouyang offers him the job of defending the local villagers from a large gang of horse thieves. They had been beaten in an earlier clash, and were expected to return soon. On the morning of the bandits’ arrival, as the near-blind swordsman goes out to confront them, he impulsively kisses the peasant girl, who is still waiting for a champion to act on her behalf. Handicapped and heavily outnumbered, he goes into battle and is killed. B A I L U
In the Chinese almanac, Bailu is the fifteenth solar term. It begins when the sun reaches 165 degrees of celestial longitude and ends when it reaches 180 degrees. It refers to that time in autumn when the northern birds begin to migrate southwards. A disheveled swordsman, Hong Qi (Jacky Cheung), hungry and shoeless, takes up residence by a wall near Ouyang’s shack. He rides a camel and is looking for adventures in the jianghu. Despite misgivings, Ouyang feeds him and offers him the job of finishing off the remaining horse thieves. Hong Qi accomplishes this with little trouble, and goes on to help the peasant girl by avenging her brother; she ‘pays’ him with one of her eggs. Hong Qi loses a finger in the second swordfight, and falls sick. Ouyang refuses to send for a doctor, and so the peasant girl nurses him back to health herself before leaving. Hong Qi’s wife (Bai Li) appears, determined to accompany him through the jianghu, and refuses to take his “no” for an answer. On a day that the almanac notes is “extremely favorable for the North”, he leaves with her across the desert. Seeing Hong Qi and his wife depart stirs Ouyang’s memories of his romantic failure in White Camel Mountain.

L I C H U N
In the Chinese almanac, Lichun is the first solar term. It begins when the sun reaches 315 degrees of celestial longitude and ends when it reaches 330 degrees. It refers to the end of winter and the beginning of spring. Ouyang visits Peach Blossom Village and encounters the blind swordsman’s widow (Carina Lau). He immediately realizes that there are no peach blossoms to be seen; Peach Blossom is the woman’s name.
Meanwhile, Huang is recalling his last meeting with the woman (Maggie Cheung) who jilted Ouyang. She was ill and alone with a young son; her husband has died. Her decision to spurn Ouyang Feng now causes her grief. It was she who gave Huang the bottle of magic wine for Ouyang. She dies soon after. Huang then reveals that his yearly meeting with Ouyang was a pretext for Huang to visit this woman every year, bringing her news of her true love.
Not long after, Huang goes into a hermetic retreat but eventually rises to great prominence in the jianghu. He later becomes known as the Lord of the East.
J I N G Z H E This year, Huang does not come to visit Ouyang in the desert. Ouyang receives a message from White Camel Mountain, informing him that the woman he loves had passed away in the winter two years ago. He contemplates the reasons for his solitude. As predicted in his horoscope, he was orphaned young and has never married. He reflects upon his realization that he has avoided rejection by rejecting others first.
On a day that the almanac notes is “auspicious for moving West”, he sets his shack ablaze and sets off for White Camel Mountain. He, too, rises to great prominence in the jianghu. He later becomes known as the Lord of the West.
Into the “Jianghu”
The Jianghu – literally, “Rivers and Lakes” – is the parallel universe in which martial arts fiction is set. It is a universe that often intersects with our own: real historical figures sometimes appear in it, and it often incorporates real places and events. The sprawling casts of characters in martial-arts novels mirror the complications of real-life extended families in the Confucian tradition, just as the feuds and rivalries between factions mirror the skirmishes and wars between clans which have occurred throughout China’s history.
But there are also crucial differences between the jianghu and the world we know. Many aspects of social organization are absent, and individuals – both heroic and otherwise – define their own morality. The characters are generally larger (or smaller) than life, capable of superhuman feats in controlling their own qi (vital energy), and gender is somewhat more fluid than it is in the workaday world. Exotic martial skills are elaborated fantastically, and those who have mastered them take equally exotic and fantastical noms de guerre, such as “Malignant Lord of the East” or “Malicious Lord of the West”. Supernatural forces can come into play. Most striking of all, the conventional laws of physics can be suspended: when the need arises, these people can fly.
The literary genre dates back at least to the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD), when various orally transmitted tales about the heroes of a rebellious uprising against the government of the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1126 AD) were formalized into the prose romance translated as The Water Margin or Outlaws of the Marsh. (Louis Cha explicitly situates his own martial-arts novels in a tradition dating back to the oral storytelling of the Song Dynasty.) Jianghu romances became massively popular in the late Qing Dynasty and in early republican China (the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the western calendar), and by the late 1920s many had been adapted for the movies. In fact wuxia pian – “martial chivalry films” – were the most popular indigenous Chinese genre produced by the Shanghai film industry in its early years, and some stories were spun out to twenty or more feature-length episodes. The genre was banned by Chiang Kai Shek’s KMT government in 1931; it was seen to risk promoting sedition and lawlessness.
The communist government which came to power in China in 1949 was no more friendly towards the genre than the KMT had been, but jianghu novels and films made a spirited comeback in the Hong Kong of the 1950s – an example soon followed by Taiwan. Jin Yong (Louis Cha) began serializing jianghu novels in 1955, achieving great popularity and gradually emerging as the greatest writer the genre had even produced. A little lower in the pantheon sits the Taiwanese jianghu novelist Gu Long, best known in the west for the long series of films made from his books by Chu Yuan at Shaw Brothers in the 1970s and 1980s. And while these new novels were appearing, many classics from the 1930s and earlier were reprinted, creating a new generation of fans and genre historians.
The coming-of-age of the wuxia film genre is usually located in the mid-1960s, when King Hu made COME DRINK WITH ME (1965) and Zhang Xinyan & Fu Qi made THE JADE BOW (1966). King Hu went on to take the tradition to new heights in Taiwan with DRAGON GATE INN (1966) and A TOUCH OF ZEN (1969); meanwhile Zhang Che and other directors at Shaw Brothers pushed into a more macho and bloody direction, paving the way for the unarmed combat kung-fu films of the 1970s which made Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan world famous. The old genre traditions were brought back by the ‘new wave’ director Tsui Hark, whose debut film was the jianghu classic THE BUTTERFLY MURDERS (1979) and whose first big-budget special-effects extravaganza ZU: WARRIORS FROM THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN (1983) was inspired by a martial-arts novel by Li Shanji first published in 1930.
In recent years, thanks to Wong Kar Wai, Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou, a much larger western audience has found its way into the jianghu. ASHES OF TIME (1994) and CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON (2000) are films that pay their dues to their ancestors in the genre while inflecting the jianghu with modern ideas about psychology, sexuality and existential loneliness. Zhang Yimou’s HERO (2002) and HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS (2004) owe less to the genre’s history and more to an imaginative re-reading of China’s history, but they are none the less rooted in the jianghu. Either way, the jianghu rules.
About Jianghu novelist Louis Cha (author of Eagle Shooting Heroes, from which ASHES OF TIME REDUX is adapted).
Louis Cha published twelve martial-arts novels between 1955 and 1972 under the pen-name Jin Yong. The novels first appeared as serials in newspapers and were later published as books, in some cases running to five volumes. Unlike some other writers in the genre, Cha always anchors his fictions in specified historical periods. His novels have been adapted many, many times – as films, as TV serials, as comic-strip graphic novels, and latterly as computer games. The third of them was The Eagle Shooting Heroes (1957-59), collected in four volumes, which contains the characters Dongxie (Malignant Lord of the East) and Xidu (Malicious Lord of the West). In ASHES OF TIME, Wong Kar Wai has extrapolated these two characters from Cha’s narrative – with one or two others, such as Hong Qi – and has imagined what they might have been like as younger men.
Louis Cha was born in 1924 in Zhejiang Province, China. He came to prominence in Hong Kong after the war as the founder and publisher of the Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao Daily News – still the territory’s most respected and authoritative independent broadsheet. He later also founded and published the Shin Ming Daily News in Singapore. Aside from his fiction under the name Jin Yong, he has written political commentaries, journalism and historical essays; he has also served on various public bodies and played an active role in Hong Kong’s intellectual life. He retired from his publishing empire shortly before Hong Kong reverted to China’s sovereignty.
An exceptionally cultured man, steeped in Chinese history, he is also a scholar of Buddhism. He is Wynflete Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and an Honorary Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. He holds an honorary degree as Doctor of Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong, and an honorary degree as Doctor of Literature at the University of British Columbia, Canada. Queen Elizabeth II conferred on him the O.B.E. and France has made him a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur.
Despite these many honors, his fiction still goes unmentioned in most western synoptic accounts of Asian literature. This is partly because English translations have begun to appear only since 1993, and partly, no doubt, because of snobbish prejudices against genre literature. But the ‘Jin Yong’ novels, revered in Chinese communities throughout the world, develop a very ancient Chinese oral and literary tradition. Beyond their value as entertainment, they are refined and sophisticated commentaries on the philosophical traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, and analyses of the on-going struggle for a mature Chinese cultural identity.

Stephen Holden writes:

Jan Dite (Ivan Barnev), the plucky little waiter who bounces around central Europe in Jiri Menzel’s epic comedy “I Served the King of England,” has colossal ambitions. Catering to political and military fat cats at a fancy brothel in 1930s Czechoslovakia, his appetites are piqued as he observes these pompous boors dandling prostitutes on their laps while washing down obscenely rich banquets with beer and brandy.

As the song says, “Them that’s got shall get. …” These scenes of marathon gourmandizing offer some of the most pungently satirical observations of unfettered gluttony ever filmed. While Jan serves these beasts (and discreetly services their women), his vision of becoming a wealthy hotelier begins to take shape.

This chipper protagonist, whose name means John Child, is a Chaplinesque symbol of a nation made cynical after being taken over first by Nazis and then by Communists within the span of a decade. Growing up in a place that exchanged one totalitarian nightmare for another, who wouldn’t be cynical?

Mr. Barnev, the wonderful Bulgarian actor who plays the young Jan, resembles a doll-like hybrid of Mikhail Baryshnikov and Derek Jacobi with a dash of Roman Polanski. Jan will cheerfully do what it takes to survive and flourish without political commitment or moral scruples.

“I Served the King of England” is Mr. Menzel’s sixth screen adaptation of the work of Bohumil Hrabal, the Czech satirist who died in 1997 and is best known for writing the screenplay for Mr. Menzel’s 1966 classic, “Closely Watched Trains,” as well as the novel on which it was based. There is hardly a moment in this new film in which you are not aware that its absurdist view of the human condition was shaped by traumatic 20th-century events.

David Suissa writes about Shalhevet in this week’s Jewish Journal: "A coed Modern Orthodox high school that would empower individual students to think for themselves and grow morally in a Torah environment."

Thinking for yourself sounds to me like a goyisha value? And what does it mean to "grow morally?" Does that mean grow more observant? If not, what does it mean?

I don’t understand this goyisha language.

Bais Yaakov Los Angeles (ultra-Orthodox high school for girls in the Fairfax/La Brea area) has banned its students from going to gyms, even female-only gyms such as Curves.

Needless to say, Bais Yaakov girls are also banned from going on dates (and to movies?).

Cantor Shim Craemer of Riverdale visited this past Shabbat for consideration as the Chazzan. Made a good impression. A nice voice and a mench par excellence. It seems the nod will probably go to Nati Baram of the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem - a rising superstar in the Cantorial world. Hear him here.

From the WSJ:

High-school students’ performance on SAT college-entrance exams stalled, and the gap widened between low-scoring minority groups and the overall population, raising questions about the quality of teaching in U.S. schools.

Average scores for the class of 2008 were 502 for the critical-reading section, 515 for mathematics and 494 for writing. Each of the three numbers was identical to the averages in 2007, meaning combined scores remain at the lowest level so far in the current decade. The reading scores of the past two years were the lowest since 1994. Math represented the worst showing since 2001. Each section is judged on a 200- to 800-point scale.

African-American students received an average critical reading score of 430, 72 points below the general population and three points beneath their 2007 level. Math scores showed a similar pattern. Hispanic students’ scores also lagged behind, though the gap was smaller.

Luke Ford, Joey Kurtzman discuss this week’s Torah portion Re’eh.