Saw Sally Potter's "The Man Who Cried" last night. Quite good. It's a project whose script she's been working on a long time, about displaced persons set against the backdrop of WWII. But that's on the narrative level. Stylistically it goes right back to "The Gold Diggers," with its theatrical tableaus and emphasis on the dialectic between foreground and background space in opera.
Christina Ricci stars as a Jewish girl from a Russian village whose father leaves to go to America. She ends up being adopted by a British family and on reaching adulthood heads off to Paris where she's befriended by an Ann Dvorakesque tootsie played by the marvelous Cate Blanchett. John Turturro, as a vain fascist tenor comes to figure in her life as does Johnny Depp (the man that no one seems to be able to do without these days -- and with good reason) as a gypsy horseman.
