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Apparently it’s easier to make a movie that looks real than one that feels real. The Man Who Cried is a costume drama that bathes in its authentic European settings and painstaking period detail–it’s of a piece with arthouse fare like Divided We Fall, The Luzhin Defence or The Golden Bowl. Yet writer-director Sally Potter has penned such self-consciously awkward dialogue and wrangled such limp-dishrag performances out of the cast that all the historical verisimilitude is for nought.
The story, commencing in 1927 and spanning nearly twenty years, is that of Fegele, a Jewish peasant girl. At the age of five, she lives in a ramshackle, beleaguered Russian shtetl. Her father, a yarmulke-and-tzitzes-clad cantor, leaves to make a better life in America, and Fegele is separated from the rest of her family soon thereafter, landing in England, where she is dubbed “”Susie.”” In short order, she morphs into saucer-eyed, cherubic pixie Christina Ricci.