FILM

National Review, Oct 26, 1998 by John Simon

From the Mouths of Daughters

JOHN SIMON

IMISSED the first few minutes of A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries, during which the enchanting Virginie Ledoyen writes a letter to her unborn son whom she'll offer for adoption. She is 15, and not ready for motherhood. Of course, by the time he is adopted by the American Willises at age 5 or 6, she should have been able to cope. If there is an explanation for this, I'll never know: a Merchant-Ivory film tends to be hard enough to view once.

This one is based on an autobiographical novel by Kaylie Jones, daughter of the novelist James Jones, about her life from little girl to high-school senior, first in Paris and later in America-here New England, though in actuality Long Island. How factual it all is (screenplay by the director, James Ivory, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala) I cannot say, but I am ready to believe that the parents, Bill and Marcella Willis, would be the sort not to learn French in all those Paris years.

The film is divided into three sections, each bearing the name of a masculine character. "Billy" is the name Benot chooses for himself after his adoption by the Willises, and here we have his early childhood with Channe, as Kaylie is called in the story. The kids get into amusing situations both at their bilingual school and at home, both in Paris and on vacation in the country, while the adults around them indulge their expatriate existences. Child actors fluent in both French and English had to be found, and Samuel Gruen and Luisa Conlon (daughter of the conductor James Conlon) fill the bill endearingly. The best episodes concern Channe's near-rape by a neighbor kid in his country tree house, with snails as aphrodisiacs; and Mrs. Willis's battle with a French schoolmistress she deems too strict.

The next section, "Francis," is less winning. Francis Fortescue is an American boy who becomes the teenaged Channe's best friend. He has an eccentric mother, played by Jane Birken (how sadly aged!), and himself exhibits all the signs of budding homosexuality in his weird clothes, passion for opera, ability to sing arias for his schoolmates in class, etc. Yet the film makes nothing of this, and the section climaxes with Francis's declaration of love to Channe, who is on the verge of returning stateside with her family.

As Anthony Roth Costanzo plays Francis, he is even more obnoxious than precocious, and because Channe, enacted by the then 14-year-old Leelee Sobieski, towers over him, he also emerges unduly ludicrous. But again, bilingualism seems to have been the main basis for casting, since neither Anthony Roth Costanzo nor Leelee Sobieski, who looks like a pubescent Helen Hunt, abounds in charm. Surrounding them are scenes concerning the Willises, Mrs. Fortescue, and peripheral adults leading their purplish lives, though none of this manages to have much impact, not even Bill Willis's problems with his writing.

We also get a romance between Candida, the Willis's faithful Portuguese maid, and Mamadou, a jolly African who impulsively woos her. The episodes concerning these characters are even more, so to speak, episodic than the rest, but the entire film is singularly fragmented, with very little sense of a continuum. Typically inept is an avant-garde performance of Salome at the Paris Opra in which all the principals shoot up into a drugged daze, and the heroine is executed by lethal injection-experimental nonsense that seems here out of both period and place. And Francis, who already knows all about opera, sees nothing bizarre about this production.

In the final section, "Keith," we are in New England, where Channe and Billy attend a prototypical high school. Channe loses her virginity, and Bill his life to heart disease. All-too-familiar vignettes follow in rapid succession, but neither scne faire, the deflowering or the death, is actually shown. The highest dramatic pitch is attained when Channe runs off to a New Year's party with her boyfriend just as Bill is stricken, and when Billy refuses to read his birth mother's diary, which Marcella, as she promised, hands over to him. There are awkwardly-squeezed-in flashbacks to the birth mother's affair, which at least afford a few precious glimpses of Virginie Ledoyen. Finally, though deprived of its head, the Willis family unites closely in a waterside scene that drips with sentiment.

Among the adult actors, Dominique Blanc as Candida is most noteworthy. Barbara Hershey tries hard to be an idiosyncratic Marcella; as Bill, Kris Kristofferson again distinguishes himself chiefly by his slitty eyes, deeply recessed under beetling brow and brows, but not especially worth our spelunking.

n Based on what looks like another autobiographical novel, this one by Anna Quindlen, One True Thing is a standard weepie or women's picture, in which Meryl Streep gets to play first the ideal, then the gallantly moribund, wife and mother Kate Gulden. Married to George, a self-centered college professor and novelist, she has a feckless son, Brian, and an ambitious daughter, Ellen, who is beginning to make it as a journalist in New York.