Esther Kahn [DVD]

this is a beautiful film. its everything that great serious filmmaking stands for. summer phoenix was perfect in it. she is such an amazing actress. anything with her,rain,river or joquin is a pretty safe bet that its gonna be amazing. i first saw summer in the movie "girl". she disapeared in the movies for a long while and then came back. this is one of the first i saw after her film come back. after i saw the believer that is. both esther kahn and the believer are some of my favorite movies. stunning.

Oh my, I wish I could get the time I spent watching this back. Summer is gorgeous as usual in this, but the doe-eyed incompetent half-wit she portrays in this is annoying, dull, and bland beyond description. How this inept idiot could have ever made it to the stage stretches credibility to the limit. One star for seeing her breasts and another for the eating glass scene. If this movie was a little more watchable, it could be considered dumb. Very good job depicting the look and feel of the era though.

very good

Esther Kahn is a young Jewish woman living in an overcrowded, Jewish Ghetto in 19th century England. She is surrounded by looming, oppressive, dreary, featureless, worn brick architecture, narrow sidewalks and streets, blacked out windows, and hordes of black-and-brown jacketed crowds.She lives in a tiny apartment with her large family whom operate a clothes shop within the apartment. As child, she worked, had no privacy, wore colourless clothing, shared a bed, and remained silent to avert the mockery of her mother and siblings who ridiculed her for mimicking them out of boredom.As a young woman, her life remains the same - she has no privacy, lives in a state of mental and physical hebetude and lethargy and inertia, exhudes a blank, featureless expression, is cloathed in plain, unremarkable clothing, and is continuously oppressed and dwarfed by the grey, mundane, massively imposing buildings, and narrow streets, and narrow hallways, and narrow doorways, and her loud-mouthed mother and siblings, and the prosaic, banal lifestyle of her family.Her only form of mental escape is the Yiddish theatre. Sitting in the balcony, front row, leaning over the rail, there is a vast space between her mind and the stage, a space that enables her to breathe, think, feel, and yearn.Yet despite the freedom of thought the open stage provides for Esther, her face and body remain torpidly somnolent, impassive, dispassionate.The plain and common looking Summer Phoenix brilliantly conveys Esther's emotionless demeanour - Summer/Esther does not convey any desire to want anything or anticipate anything.After an unusual explosive confrontation with her mother, Esther finally decides to break free from the bleak life she is trapped in.She is eventually cast in minor parts in a few stage plays, and meets Nathan Quellen, portrayed by quintessential British actor Ian Holm, who commences to teach Esther the technical skill of acting.From this point forward, Esther begins a grueling dual journey of learning how to act and learning how to feel.She begins experiencing emotions she never felt before, and she begins gaining the experience she needs to fully comprehend and wield the technical aspects of acting.Nathan walks her across the stage through the physical and emotional steps of surprise, hesitancy, anger, disgust, self-loathing, etc; she then begins walking though those emotions in her personal life.There are three truths, Nathan tells her - the truth of how a character reacts, the truth of how the actor would react, and the truth that a character and actor are not the same person.These technical steps and three truths slowly deconstruct Esther's defenses and lead her to two edifying experiences in the denouement of the film which mark the beginning of her freedom of thought, movement, and emotion.Esther Kahn is a technically challenging film to watch because of its odd and narrow camera shots, lackluster photo direction which conveys the realistic lackluster setting of the Ghetto, and Summer Phoenix's characterless and insipid and unappealing portrayal which brilliantly conveys Kahn's mental and physical hebetude and lethargy and lackluster nature.A must-see film for people who want to learn the technical craft of acting, and for people who appreciate minimalistic films and character studies.

ESTHER KAHN is a bizarre film by French Director Arnaud Desplechin ("La Sentinelle") that is so obsessed with atmosphere that it almost forgets a storyline (the film is based on a short story by the same name by Arthur Symons written in 1905). That criticism having been said, if you enjoy film making that takes chances and is wholly unique in the process, then this is a film to savor.ESTHER KAHN appears to be a "Portrait of the Actress as a Young Woman" and if that is the intent, it succeeds on may levels. As the film opens (after introduction credits that beautifully scan the Jewish ghetto in London, concentrating on windows and doors boarded up all accompanied to exquisite music by Howard Shore) we are introduced to Esther Kahn and her close-knit family: a narrator present throughout the film describes warmly the evening meal of the Kahn family as a time when the day's events are told with as much love as the previous day's events. But in this family there is one girl Esther (Philadelphia Deda) who is an outsider, not wanting the same goals as her siblings, wandering aimlessly through poverty level workhouses until she discovers the theater as a teenager (Esther is now portrayed by Summer Phoenix). Once inside a Yiddish Theater she becomes convinced she must become an actress. She finds tutelage via an older actor Nathan (Ian Holm, in an elegant performance), finds small parts, is given the advice by Nathan that she is cold as stone, dead in fact, that she must experience love and life if she is to succeed in the theater. Committed to her goal, she has an affair with a drama critic (Fabrice Desplechin) who beds her and leaves her for an Italian actress. Esther grows as an actress and is cast in the premiere London performance of "Hedda Gabler" and it is at her opening night that she must face her demons: she has explored her sensual needs and feels the hurt and fury that accompany first encounters. Afraid to go on stage because her ex-lover the drama critic sits in the audience with his new lover, she self mutilates until her fellow actors assist her through the performance - a performance in which she triumphs. But what her life will be after the gaslights go dark is left to speculation.A good story, well told. The only problems with this film are its excessive length (2 hours 22 minutes), the superimposed voices in both Yiddish and English which usually means that despite the nice effect the words in neither language are audible. Howard Shore has composed some beautiful music (he uses Charles Ives' "The Unanswered Question" as background for a appropriate moment in the story) but the sound mixer covers the dialogue with the music, again preventing our hearing what is being said. The cinematography is mesmerizingly beautiful, with ghost images often superimposed on the action and the atmosphere of London ghettoes and the stages where the plays happen are elegant. Summer Phoenix is rather one dimensional in her bland affect with the sole exception of when she becomes outraged at the world or herself. But much of that is intrinsic to the character until she become an actress - and when Phoenix is on the stage she is dead emotionally and physically. The supporting cast is superb - if only we could understand what they were saying (see above). Still in all, the mood and message of the film lingers in the mind like a new piece of music long after the story ends. The DVD has only a few added features: an interview with Summer Phoenix shows a self-conscious young actress uncomfortable with the camera and saying little except written PR notes for the film. Deleted scenes are included and are aptly atmospheric: would that they had been inserted in the final product, replacing some of the redundant ennui retained. In English and Yiddish with NO subtitles (not "Dubbed") in a movie that would have been greatly enhanced with that option.

Un réalisateur qui mériterait beaucoup plus d'attention qu'il n'en suscite aujourd'hui. L'héroïne du film est à la fois émouvante et agaçante mais toujours attachante.Très beau film.

je crois que c'est le plus beau film que j'ai vu si vous aimez desplechin vous ne serez pas déçu. a trembler de plaisir

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