Back when it was first released, I happened to pick up a promotional postcard for this film and stuck it on the back of my bedroom door for reasons which presently escape me but no doubt had something to do with the moody, black and white (tinged slightly brown to give the sense of an old photo) image of Christina Ricci which was its front. That was years ago but, due to the mounting of the card in my living space (amidst all the other cultural detritus littering my walls and shelves), the film has vaguely remained somewhere in my consciousness without my ever learning anything about it beyond the rest of its major cast (Johnny Depp, Cate Blanchett, John Turturro).
Anyhow, turns out to be an arthouse historical/personal-voyage narrative, following a displaced Russian Jew (Ricci) who is uprooted aged five or sixish (circa 1927 or so, from memory), voyages with scores of others (but without anyone she knows) to England, where she is renamed 'Suzie' on arrival and forced to forsake her native Yiddish for English, and ends up in Paris as a singer just before the shadow of war falls over the city, with only a coin and a photo of her father, gone to America long ago, by which to remember her family.
Enter broody resentful outsider (gypsy) Depp, glamorous, extroverted, insecure fellow emigre Blanchett, and arrogant but successful Italian opera singer Turturro...but the main event is Suzie's search for her origins, her place and her self. Thinking about it now, it's actually quite a brave move - and, I think, both truthful and apt in light of the film's logic - to portray a character engaged in such a search as so taciturn, and to give her so little dialogue.
I don't know, though. The Man Who Cried held my interest throughout and I found it quite satisfying, but it didn't really affect me (except for the pathos inherent in the figure of a lonely, bewildered, unhappy child), and overall, despite some nice images and imagery (the theme of music as a connecting thread always resonates, and the dual-character water/rebirth motif was well played), I didn't feel that it all quite came together.
