Blame it on Fidel
When I told my new french friend that I’d watched before sunrise a few times, he said, “well, you’re either a hopeless romantic, or a you’ve been bitten by the french bug.” To which I of course replied, a bit of both. I’ve decided to live up at least to the latter by renting a few french films. (Truthfully, I’ve just been devouring good films and good books lately, see: lars and the real girl, into the wild, once, & ironman)
Tonight I watched, La Faute à Fidel! I was quite nervous about it, after reading the little white sleeve: “…9 year old Anna, a privileged young girl living in Paris and comforted by a life filled with order and routine. But over the course of a year, Anna’s structured life is thrown into turmoil when her parents are drawn into Paris’s turbulent and radical 1970’s political scene”
Turbulent? Turmoil?
I’m all for serious movies but they end up sitting there for weeks, bathed in my good intentions, mocking me, while the money siphons out of my bank account via netflix. So tonight I decided to either give it a go or send it back and the end result was surprising. Was it dramatic? Yes, but it was more so clever, funny, touching and interesting.
From Rotten Tomatoes (the less scary and more fitting description):
How do our experiences shape us, and how is political consciousness formed? Blame It on Fidel uses a light, charming touch to shed light on these questions. At the film’s epicenter is whip-smart Anna, a feisty Parisian girl forced to assimilate cataclysmic changes when her parents decide to devote themselves full time to radical activism. Anna, kicking and screaming, must adjust to refugee nannies with strange cooking habits, a cramped apartment filled with noisy, scruffy revolutionaries, and the humiliation of no longer being allowed to attend her beloved catechism class. The fun of Blame It on Fidel is watching Anna valiantly sort through the dizzying array of contradictory ideologies flying at her–from communism to Greek mythology, from Vietnamese folktales and women’s rights to Catholic morality. The film’s emotional power arises from Anna’s transformation from close-minded bourgeois princess to open-hearted truth seeker and her gradual internalization of what her parents, albeit clumsily, are trying to accomplish. Seamless and energetic, Blame It on Fidel features substantive, yet buoyant, performances by Julie Depardieu and Stefano Accorsi, as well as a hilarious turn by Benjamin Feuillet as the little brother who unwittingly teaches Anna a thing or two.
I recommend it to all my cinephile friends and then some.
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