Mina Tannenbaum Written and directed by Martine Dugowson Starring Romane Bohringer and Elsa Zylberstein BUY IT A L S O_.T O D A Y Blue Glow MTV's "Real World" invades Seattle; the 100 greatest films ever The lost art of celebrity journalism By Charles Taylor Kenneth Tynan was the last great master of intelligent celebrity journalism Now Showing New video releases for June 16 Y E S T E R D A Y American squirm By Sarah Vowell Uneasy rider: The hardest thing to believe about Truman is not that he's a media baby, but that he's an American who has never once left home (06/15/98) R E C E N T_. M O V I E S Mr. Jealousy Reviewed by Charles Taylor Noal Baumbach's new urban comedy smartly satirizes self-involvement -- without being too self-involved (06/12/98) Six Days, Seven Nights Reviewed by Stephanie Zacharek As cheap and predictable as a discount package tour, but still a terrific getaway (06/11/98) Home Movies By Charles Taylor Kitsch is bustin' out all over with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis (06/09/98) The Truman Show Reviewed by Charles Taylor The boy in the celluloid bubble: Jim Carrey breaks out of the comedy routine in "The Truman Show" (06/05/98) Big Foot: An interview with Terry Gilliam By David Wallis The "Fear and Loathing" director stomps on Hollywood and American literalism (06/05/98) BROWSE THE MOVIE ARCHIVES COLUMNS FEATURES REVIEWS INTERVIEWS

[ H O M E_.M O V I E S_.B Y_.C H A R L E S_.T A Y L O R ]________ __________Wo_.m_.e_.n_.. . . . . . . . O N_.T H E_.V E R G E IN A BURST OF FRESH AIR FOR FRENCH FILM, "MINA TANNENBAUM" IS A MOVIE ABOUT THE MESSY, PAINFUL SIDE OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIPS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A few weeks ago two women friends of mine were having a conversation in which they admitted to one another that they were each wary of women friends. They were sick, one told me later, of watching women complain about what pigs men are, and then seeing those same women behave badly toward the men in their lives. They were exasperated with women who wore their insecurities on their sleeves and treated their female friends who didn't share those insecurities as if they weren't deserving of membership in some special club. Impolite feelings like these usually get left out of movies about female friendships. Pictures as different as "Entre Nous" and "Thelma and Louise" are, at bottom, us vs. them movies -- "them" being men, and "us" being the powerful united front of sisterhood, which is usually portrayed as loving, supportive, indivisible, one nation under the goddess. It's as if acknowledging any divisions that couldn't be sealed up by love and tears equals endorsing some retrograde image of women. "Mina Tannenbaum," the 1993 debut film by French director Martine Dugowson, plunges right into those fissures. It's an undeniably feminist picture: Dugowson's subject is the complexity of women's friendships and the even thornier tangle of women's relationships with their mothers. The characters' pain, as well as their pleasure, is all firmly grounded in female experience. As a filmmaker, however, Dugowson knows that she can't make art if she's trying to be a credit to her gender. She risks taking on the messy, unresolvable emotions that female buddy movies usually ignore. The women in "Mina Tannenbaum" love each other. They also wound, criticize and compete. The women I know who've seen the film speak of it in terms of that overworked cliché, a shock of recognition. For men, it's like being privy to all the conversations and arguments you never hear about, and it's not nearly as alien an experience as some men might think. "Mina Tannenbaum" is about that best friend who drives you crazy half -- or even three-quarters -- of the time, and yet the one you can never bring yourself to break with. Mina (Romane Bohringer) and Ethel (Elsa Zylberstein) are one of those mismatches that often becomes a lifelong bond. They meet in 1968 when they're both 10, both growing up Jewish in Paris and both outcasts among kids their age. The similarities end there. Ethel is the outsider who desperately wants to be accepted, and Mina is the sort who craves and disdains acceptance at the same time. Ethel, who comes from a prosperous middle-class family, is bubbly and shallow, a sensualist. Without much of a passion for anything, she winds up doing pop journalism. Mina, whose family is solidly working class, is withdrawn and intense, something of a pain. She knows how her unyielding manner, her unyielding standards, keep her at arm's length from others, and yet she can't relax them, with Ethel, with the men in her life or with the teachers and gallery owners she encounters when she becomes a painter. To Mina, that would mean surrendering her self-respect. The friendship between Mina and Ethel is both salve and irritant. Neither one can keep from seeking out the other for support -- or keeping a running tally of all her friend's shortcomings. The first part of the movie covers familiar ground -- disappointments in love, the women's dissatisfaction with their bodies and their appearances. (Mina's straight hair and glasses give her an owlish look. Ethel, who was a chubby kid, still thinks of herself as fat; she's not, just fleshy.) These scenes never feel rote because Dugowson has a knack for making the emotions raw and fresh; they stay in the back of our mind as we watch the older Mina and Ethel navigate their way through relationships and establish themselves professionally. Dugowson juxtaposes the ways in which we reinvent ourselves with the parts of our personalities that never change, and the hostility we feel toward those who call us back to the identities we think we've discarded. When Ethel gets into a fight with her mother and screams, "I'm not a child," she reverts to a screaming adolescent in front of our eyes. Dugowson is alive to the humiliations (sexual, professional, social) that Mina and Ethel face as women, but her real subject is the ambivalence of their friendship, which is at least as debilitating as it is sustaining. Their sympathy for each other is always tempered by unspoken criticism. Mina and Ethel walk around carrying on an argument with each other in their heads, and it gets in the way of their lives. The movie is honest enough to admit Ethel's realization, after being separated from Mina, "With time, she preferred the memory of her friend to her presence." There is a difference between being asked to sympathize with characters whose faults neither the filmmaker nor the actors own up to and being asked to feel something for characters whose every flaw is out in the open. Dugowson takes the latter approach. Bohringer and Zylberstein give the sort of performances that make no compromises for the sake of winning over the audience, and yet win us over anyway. After a long period when French movies seemed divided between stultified prestige adaptations of the classics and big, dumb entertainments, a handful of filmmakers have emerged who've revitalized the personal tradition of French filmmaking. I'm thinking of directors like Claire Denis ("I Can't Sleep," "Nénette et Boni") and Olivier Assayas ("Irma Vep," "Cold Water"). There are older filmmakers, too, still working in that tradition, like André Téchiné ("Ma saison préférée") and Jacques Rivette ("La belle noiseuse," "Haut bas fragile"). And there are actors with vivid personalities: Laurence Côté, Marianne Denicourt, Natalie Richard, Chiara Mastroianni. Of all the new French filmmakers, Dugowson (and Assayas in "Irma Vep") comes closest to the sense of discovery and possibilities that animated the '60s new wave work of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda. At several points in "Mina Tannenbaum," Dugowson quotes directly from Godard's "Two or Three Things I Know About Her." This is an ultimately tragic film, but its melancholy is mixed with Dugowson's exhilaration at working in the medium and her confidence in using whatever means are at hand. If "Mina Tannenbaum," one of the most impressive European debuts since the '70s, is a sign of life for French film, then its nearly nonexistent theatrical run in this country is further proof that foreign films are on the critical list in America. Last year, Film Comment made a convincing case that, had the same situation existed in the '60s, American audiences would not have seen the work of Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, Marco Bellochio, Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray. Dugowson's second film, 1996's "Portraits chinois" ("Shadow Play"), was released in Britain, but not here. If you're lucky enough to live near a university or a museum with a good film program, you might get to see some current foreign films that won't be turning up at commercial theaters. I am encouraged by how many of these foreign films turn up on video. I just wish I didn't have to wait for them to get there to alert readers to their existence. SALON | June 16, 1998 Charles Taylor's video column, Home Movies, appears in Salon every Tuesday. - - - - - - - - - - - - N O W_S H O W I N G [ New releases available June 16 ] The Wings of the Dove Spice World Fallen The Rage Switchback