The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, which you will agree has one of the more ungainly titles of recent years, is everything that Sex and the City wanted to be.  It follows the lives of four women, their career adventures, their romantic disasters and triumphs, their joys and sadness.  These women are all in their early 20s, which means they are learning life’s lessons; SATC is about forgetting them. 



The traveling pants, you will recall, are a pair of jeans that the four best friends tried on in a clothing store in the 2005 movie.  Magically, they were a perfect fit for all four.  So they agree that each can wear the jeans for a week of the coming summer, and then FedEx them to the next name in rotation.  Following the jeans, in both movies, we follow key moments in the girls’ lives. 



Carmen is my favorite.  Played by the glowing America Ferrara (Real Women Have Curves), she has followed her tall blond friend Julia (Rachel Nichols) to Vermont, where Julia will spend the summer at the Village Playhouse.  Carmen sees herself as a stagehand, but is dragged into an audition by a talented British actor named Ian (Tom Wisdom) and amazingly gets the female lead in A Winter’s Tale.  Not so amazingly, she falls in love with Ian, and the jealous Julia tries to sabotage her happiness.  Meanwhile, her remarried mother produces a baby brother for her. 



Alexis Bledel plays Lena, not very happy in her video store job, but deeply in love with Brian (Leonardo Nam) until she gets a pregnancy scare and shuts down emotionally.  She’s “afraid of commitment,” always such a handy alibi.  Amber Tamblyn is Tibby, at Yale for the summer, recovering from her great love for Kostas (Michael Rady), the Greek boy who she thinks loves another woman.  Blake Lively is Bridget, who goes on an archeological dig in Turkey, adopts the supervising professor (Shohreh Aghashloo) as a mother-figure, then flies home to seek out her grandmother (Blythe Danner) and learn for the first time the details of her own mother’s death. 



The movie intercuts quickly but not confusingly from one story to another, is dripping with seductive locations, is not shy about romantic clichés, and has a lot of heart.  The women are all sincere, intelligent, vulnerable, sweet, warm.  That’s in contrast to SATC with its narcissistic and shallow heroines. The SATC ladies should fill their flasks with Cosmopolitans, go to see The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, and cry their hearts out with futile regret for their misspent lives. 



Because the four leads spend the summer in different places, the movie has an excuse to drop in interesting supporting characters.  Blythe Danner is splendid as the Alabama grandmother who knows the whole story of Bridget’s mom.  Leonardo Nam is a kind and perceptive boyfriend for Lena, Shohreh Aghashloo (The House of Sand and Fog) is a role model for Bridget, Kyle McLachlan has fun as the wine-sipping director of the summer playhouse, Tom Wisdom does a lot with the small role of the playhouse star.  And Rachel Nichols as Julia proves a principle that should be in the Little Movie Glossary: If a short, curvy, sun-kissed heroine has a tall, thin blonde as a roommate, that blonde is destined to be a bitch.  No way around it. 



As for the pants themselves, they’ve gathered a lot of patches and embroideries over the three years since the last installment, and still fit.  But not so much is made about them in this film, and by the end they’ve disappeared, sparing us The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 3 and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 4.  The movies are inspired by the novels of Ann Brashares, but this one, I learn, combines plot details from novels 2, 3 and 4, and so the sisters can go their separate ways, no doubt keeping in touch by e-mail and congratulating themselves on being infinitely better than the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. 

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2

Three stars



Stars: America Ferrara, Alexis Bledel, Blake Lively and Amber Tamblyn

Director: Sanaa Hamri

Rated: PG-13 for mature material and sensuality

Merchant-Ivory light

Brideshead Revisted  is a well acted and crafted British period piece, but no Dickens

No love story can be wholly satisfying in which the crucial decisions are made by the mother of the loved woman; still less, when she is the mother of both the loved woman and the loved man, and believes she is defending their immortal souls.  That is the dilemma in Evelyn Waugh’s masterful novel Brideshead Revisited, made into an inspired TV miniseries in 1981 and now adapted into a somewhat less inspired film. 



The story is told by Charles Ryder (Matthew Goode), who when we meet him is a famous painter, a guest on a postwar Atlantic crossing.  On board he encounters Julia Mottram (Hayley Atwell), who, when she was Julia Flyte in the years between the wars, inflamed Charles with love.  That he was previously, less ardently in love with her brother Sebastian (Ben Whishaw) was a complication.  That he was a middle-class boy infatuated with the entire family — their inherited Marchmain title, their wealth, their history, their great mansion Brideshead — was in a way at the bottom of everything. 



The novel begins during the war, when Charles is posted to Brideshead, requisitioned as a military headquarters.  His memories come flooding back, bittersweet, mournful.  Time rolls back to the autumn day at Oxford, when Charles has moved into his ground-floor rooms just in time for Sebastian to throw up through the open window.  Sebastian is a dazzling youth, witty, beautiful, the center of a gay coterie.  Charles is not his type, is apparently not even gay, but that for Sebastian is the whole point, and he takes the boy under his arm. 



The friendship between Charles and Sebastian during a summer holiday at Brideshead is enchanted and platonic until a tentative but passionate kiss.  Then Lady Julia comes into view, and during a later holiday in Venice, she and Charles fall in love — and Sebastian is shattered when he realizes it.  To blame his disintegration on lost love would be too simple, however, because from being an alcoholic he rapidly progresses into self-destruction in the hashish and opium dens of Morocco, his youthful perfection turned into a ghastly caricature. 

At the center of all of this is Lady Marchmain (Emma Thompson, in a superb performance).  Of her son’s proclivities she professes a certain vagueness.  Of her daughter’s love for Charles, she makes it clear that it is not the matter of his lower caste that is the problem (that could be lived with), but the fact that he is an atheist, and the Marchmains have been Roman Catholic from time immemorial. 



This theme must have attracted Waugh because he was a Catholic convert and was fascinated by the division between Catholics and Protestants as a social, as well as a religious, issue.  Catholicism was once a practice punishable by death in England, and no doubt hidden somewhere in the stones of Brideshead is an ancient “priest hole,” used by aristocratic Catholic families to conceal a priest if royal troops came sniffing.  Lady Marchmain (and Julia) are not casually Catholic, but believe firmly in the dogma of the church, and that any unbaptized children would be forbidden the sight of God.  Since Charles will not renounce his atheism, he loses Julia, although not before first going as an ambassador for Lady Marchmain to Sebastian — one of the film’s best scenes. 



There are two peculiar fathers in the film.  Lord Marchmain (Michael Gambon), still officially married of course, lives in exile in a Venetian palazzo with his mistress, Cora (Greta Scacchi).  Charles’ father (Patrick Malahide) is a pronounced eccentric who lives embalmed in a London house and apparently prefers playing chess with himself than conversing with his son.  He is a character from Dickens. 



Charles is Dickensian in a way, too: the impecunious and parentless youth adrift in an unfamiliar social system.  Matthew Goode plays him as a little bland, a mirror for the emotions he attracts.  Ben Whishaw steals all of his scenes as Sebastian, the carefree ones and the doom-ladened ones.  Hayley Atwell, as Julia, could have been drawn a little more carefully.  The actress does what she can, but why, really, does Julia marry the odious and insufferable Rex Mottram, who is nothing more than a marked-down Jay Gatsby? 



The movie, while elegantly mounted and well-acted, is not the equal of the TV production, in part because so much material had to be compressed into such a shorter time.  It is also not the equal of the recent film Atonement, which in an oblique way touches on similar issues, especially unrequited love and wartime.  But it is a good, sound example of the British period drama; mid-range Merchant-Ivory, you could say.  And I relished it when Charles’ father barely noticed that he had gone away to Oxford — or come back, for that matter.

Brideshead Revisited

Three stars



Stars: Matthew Goode, Ben Whishaw and Hayley Atwell

Director: Julian Jarrold

Rated: PG-13 for some sexual content

Nothing fishy about Jellyfish

No vast revelations, just three engaging story lines



Jellyfish tells the stories of three young women whose lives, for a change, do not interlock so much as co-exist.  It never quite explains why these three were chosen and not three others.  I found that refreshing because with some films based on entwined lives, you spend more time untangling the plot than caring about it. 



In Jellyfish, one character is a waitress for a wedding catering firm, another is a new bride, and the third is a home care worker for elderly women.  To be sure, there is a mystical vision (or memory) at the end of the film, but I’m not sure I understand the logic behind it, and I don’t think I require one.  It inexplicably spans a generation, but works just as it is. 



The film is set in Tel Aviv, but it’s not an Israeli film.  That’s where it was made, but it’s not about anything particularly Israeli.  It could take place in countless cities, and it’s not “about” anything at all, in the way of a message, a theme or a revelation.  What it offers is a portrait of some time in these lives, created with attentive performances and an intriguing way of allowing them to emerge a little at a time. 



The film also gives us sharply defined supporting characters.  The most enigmatic, sufficient to be the center of a movie of her own, is an angelic little girl who wanders up to Batya (Sarah Adler) at the beach.  She has an inner tube around her middle, which she refuses to be parted from.  There are no parents in sight.  Batya takes the girl to the police, who aren’t much interested.  They advise her to care for her over the weekend, while they wait to see if a missing-persons report comes in. 



That seems a strange police decision (are there no social agencies in Israel?), but it allows a scene where Batya takes the child to her catering job, and the little girl gets her fired, and in the process she meets a woman who is a freelance wedding photographer, and so on.  The photographer is fired, too, and the women end up smoking on a loading dock, discussing turns of fate.  Batya has problems, and water is one of their common themes: (a) the little girl seemingly emerged from the sea, and (b) the leak in her apartment ceiling has covered the floor with about 4 inches of water.  A tenuous link, but there you have it. 



Another lead character is Keren (Noa Knoller), who breaks her ankle in a particularly ignominious way at her own wedding: She’s locked into a toilet cubicle and tries to climb over the door.  She and her husband have to cancel their plans for a cruise, end up in a hotel room they hate, and what’s worse, the elevator goes out, and at one point it seems that her husband might have bodily carried her up 12 flights of stairs.  Maybe only six.  Try that sometime.  The husband meets a mysterious woman from the top-floor suite, and they spend way too much time together because they’re both smokers.  The woman says she is a writer, but there’s more to it than that. 



The most realistic, down-to-earth woman in the film is Joy (Ma-nenita De Latorre), from the Philippines, who works as a minder.  Her latest client, dumped on her by the woman’s actress daughter, is a short-tempered case study who shouts at her to speak Hebrew or German.  The girl does speak English, which is enough in many situations around the world, is learning Hebrew as fast as she can, isn’t being paid much, and has a good heart.  She convinces the old woman to see her daughter as Ophelia in a decidedly peculiar Hamlet (it seems to be written, not in iambic pentameter, but in chanted repetition). 



These stories have as their justification the fact that they are intrinsically interesting.  I think that’s enough. Jellyfish won the Camera d’Or at Cannes 2007 for best first feature.  Given all the temptations that lure gifted first-time filmmakers with three stories to tell, each story with its own story within it, I think director Etgar Keret and his co-director and writer, Shira Geffen, are commendable, since they bring it in at 78 minutes.  You can easily see how it could have overstayed its welcome, especially if it ever got around to explaining that little girl, and if she’s who she seems to be in the dream or vision or hallucination or whatever.  Rather than an explanation in a case like that, I prefer the vision to appear, make its impact and leave unexplained. 

Jellyfish

Three stars



Stars: Sarah Adler, Nikol Leidman and Gera Sandler

Director: Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen

Rated: Not rated