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Fugitive Pieces (Film)
Rating: MA
Running Time: 106
Country: Canada
Director: Jeremy Podeswa
Cast: Stephen Dillane, Rosamund Pike, Rade Serbedzija, Ayelet Zura
Distributor: Aztec
Film Worth: $7.50
Release Date: November 20, 2008
“…slow moving, torpid and melancholy…”
There's nothing cripplingly wrong with Fugitive Pieces...but there's nothing very right about it either. It just ambles competently along to no great effect, and the prevalent tone is bland and insipid.
Blandness and insipidity are hardly what you'd expect though, given the subject matter. The protagonist, Jakob (Stephen Dillane), is a Polish Jew who narrowly escaped the Nazis during the war. We watch (in flashback) his parents being murdered and his sister being dragged away, never to be seen again. Little Jakob escapes into the woods, and is rescued and looked after by big-hearted Greek archaeologist Athos (Rade Serbedzija, in by far the film's strongest performance). We then jump forward a few decades. After a move to Athos' Greek island, he and Jakob have ended up in Toronto, where the mild-mannered but haunted Jakob finds love and marriage, but not happiness, with the long-suffering Alex (Rosamund Pike). Alex is driven to distraction by Jakob's inability to move on from his past, and tells a dinner guest, "It makes your brain explode. His obsession with these details - it's obscene". It's hard not to agree with her, especially as Jakob - who is, it must be said, a bit of a drip - is unappreciative of what he calls her "shameless vitality".
What follows is slow moving, torpid and melancholy, without being particularly affecting. Jakob becomes a writer, continues to brood, re-visits the island, tries to engage with other people...it's tearjerker material, but without the tears. Perhaps the original novel by Canadian poet Anne Michaels was more powerful, but if so, something was lost during the transition from page to screen.