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Solomon&Gaenor | solomon_l

Credits

Rated: R; Genre: Romance
B+
She speaks Welsh, he speaks Yiddish, and in the hills of rural Wales in 1911, the two are a forbidden match, their clans separated by ignorance and economic hardship. Solomon & Gaenor, nominated this year for a foreign film Oscar, is a Romeo and Juliet tragedy of surprising power, not least because of the exotic historical specificity of its Welsh Jewish religious and cultural tensions.

Writer director Paul Morrison (who has previously made a documentary series exploring the conflicts of British Jewish identity) pushes the catastrophe of the situation to Shakespearean proportions. But he also gives Solomon's Jewish family and Gaenor's strict Welsh Christian kin human size dignity in their awful pride, staging the action in stark gray settings. And the filmmaker is fortunate to find in Nia Roberts and especially the dynamic Welsh star Ioan Gruffudd (''Wilde'') a pair of star cross'd lovers able to express intensity in three languages. To hear the actor who played Horatio Hornblower on TV speak Yiddish is a moment of cross culturalism to savor.


Posted Aug 25, 2000
 

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