Film review: All My Puny Sorrows
Michael McGowan's adaptation of Miriam Toews' novel marries a celebrated author with a filmmaker in his creative prime.
By Chris Knight, National Post April 13, 2022
From left, Sarah Gadon and Alison Pill in All My Puny Sorrows.
There are two scenes in Michael McGowan’s adaptation of Manitoba author Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows that will likely stay with you long after the screening ends.
In one of them, sisters Elf (Sarah Gadon) and Yoli (Alison Pill) are sitting in a room in the psych ward of the hospital where Elf has been admitted after a suicide attempt. The two have a discussion about shame, its harms and benefits, and the way it can help give rise to great art. It’s a microcosm of drama, a little mini-movie in the midst of a larger story that is tinged with the dark hues of a family’s history with suicide, but also with lighter moments of grace and even humour.
Which brings us to the second unforgettable scene, in which Yoli has words with a stranger in the hospital’s parking garage, totally losing it, before running into her mother (Mare Winningham) inside the building. The comic coda to said scene is a complete corker.
All My Puny Sorrows focuses closely on the bond between the sisters – but it also encompasses the ways that religion tries (and sometimes fails) to provide comfort in times of stress.
McGowan, whose humane and humanistic stories include Saint Ralph, One Week and Still Mine, has a light touch with his adaptation.
All My Puny Sorrows is a mature and beautiful story, the union of a celebrated author with a filmmaker in his creative prime. It’s ultimately about the way grief sneaks up on us, the way death sneaks up on us and the way, sometimes, life and light sneak up on us. Try to be ready for those moments, it suggests. You can’t. But try.
5 stars out of 5
Watch All My Puny Sorrows Official Trailer [1]
Film Review: 'Charlotte'
By Sherri Linden, Hollywood Reporter Sept 17, 2021
Keira Knightley leads the voice cast of an animated feature that tells the story of German painter Charlotte Salomon, who was killed in Auschwitz but left behind an extraordinary body of work.
Scene from Charlotte, new animated biopic about the life of artist Charlotte Salomon.
Tracing the last 10 years in the brief life of German artist Charlotte Salomon, Charlotte deals head-on with depression and suicide as well as the Nazis’ genocidal war. Why use animation to tell such a harrowing story? In the hands of directors Eric Warin and Tahir Rana it’s the perfect choice. The 2D imagery, a potent representation of Salomon’s preferred medium, gouache, allows us to see the world from her inspired, painterly perspective.
Warin and Rana have made a film that is “based on a true story,” but more than that, is based on a work of art. The film is steeped in beauty at least as much as it is in sorrow, the dance of Mediterranean light a vibrant counterpoint to the creeping shadow of hatred and violence.
Salomon was in her 20s, and in exile from her native Berlin, when she felt death closing in. That time was running out for her she was certain — and so she raced to create a series of paintings to document her memories and experiences. Titled Life? Or Theatre? the collection consisted of more than a thousand visual vignettes on small sheets of paper, many of the scenes and portraits adorned with text (some consider it the first graphic novel). Salomon entrusted this fervent work to a friend; posthumously, it would be exhibited around the world, and today is housed in Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum.
Salomon’s remarkable story of resilience and visionary talent has inspired plays, an opera, a documentary and a 1981 Dutch feature. Still, it’s surprising that she’s not more widely known. With its elegant style, affecting narrative and the vivid voice work of a mostly British cast, led by Keira Knightley (Marion Cotillard tops the French version), Charlotte could, in the right hands, bring Salomon’s work and biography to a wide international audience.