Re: Film, "The Governess"

[elkahn <elkahn...>]

I saw  THE GOVERNESS and found the music quite beautiful and professionaly
performed. I recall one of the songs was the Ladino romance "Adio,
Querida."

As far as the plot[s] -- oy gevalt! -- there are too many of them.
Beautiful, independent Sephardic girl has to get a working-class job.
Nubile Sephardic girl has affair with older, reperessed gentile man with
hairy hands and kooky wife and son. Brilliant, scientific Sephardic woman
helps dim-witted gentile lover with his chemistry and invents the film
developing process. Finally, Barbara Streisand-like, liberated Sephardic
woman leaves her lying, thieving gentile lover and his depraved son -- who
also has fallen in love with her -- to return to London's family-oriented,
culturally-enobled Sephardic community.

I'm not an expert on Sephardic rituals but I did find the depictions of
Sephardic life to be very positive and really attractive. My wife -- who
is not Jewish by birth -- found the depiction of gentiles to be extremely
offensive, especially in contrast to the nobility with which the Jewish
life style was depicted.

Finally, Minnie Driver was just gorgeous to look at but there's little
chemistry between her and old "hairy hands."

Eliott Kahn





 

On Mon, 30 Nov 1998, Judith R. Cohen wrote:

> yes, I saw it. There are a lot of "top ten" songs, "La serena" etc., mostly 
> sung by Ofra Haza, who of course is Yemenite, not from a Judeo-SPanish 
> speaking background at all; and some , for the wedding scene at the 
> beginning, sung by the English group "Bu
> "Burning Bush" with Lucie Skeaping. I'm sure there'll be a sound track. It's 
> a rather bizarre "plot" - Minnie Driver is a young woman from a wealthy 
> 1840's (i.e. some of the songs probably hadn't been composed yet by then!!!!) 
> London Sephardic family, the
> there's a lot of cute, risquee girl talk between her & her sister, the father
> dies, they are impoverished, and she answers an ad to be a governess in
> Scotland where she occasionally practices a sort of minor Crypto-ism
> (I think getting the candle blessings mixed up at some point), but, rather 
> less crypitcally, both solves her employer's photography problems (she invents
> the saline solution and he takes the credit) and even less cryptically,
> has a passionate affair with him (beteer she should stick to the candles?!?!)
> but does not become pregnant or anything; she gets to return to London and set
> up a successful photography business, which seems a somewhat unlikely 
> propositon but not a whole lot less unlikely than the rest of it.
> The credits say the music was supervised by Alexander Knapp; he's a 
> musicologist in London, very knowledgeable about Ashkenazi music.
> I should have written down the song titles, but didn't; if it comes to a
> cheap repertory theatre soon, I'll get to it....
> Judith
> 
>