Last night Shane and I went to see Jeremy Podeswa’s film, Fugitive Pieces, based on his adaptation of Anne Michaels’s beautiful book of the same title. The only other patron in the theatre was a teenage boy who seemed to have brought his skateboard along for a companion. Generally speaking, the rule of thumb is that the better the book is—the more poetic the book is—the less successful the film. Happily, that’s not so in this case, and not so by a long shot. Few directors could create a film that requires such lightness of touch without tipping into overstatement, but Podeswa manages that and much more. It’s a film about grief and loss that conveys those emotions powerfully and fully, devastating you and yet leaving you feeling whole afterwards, a film about the holocaust focusing not on the external but on the internal holocaust. It’s a remarkable achievement.
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