An American Rhapsody

An American Rhapsody has many things to recommend it. Among them are its non-exploitative glimpse at the immigrant experience as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl, its sober take on the issues of mother-daughter relations which are viewed from a fresh, uncluttered period angle, and its excellent performances, particularly that of Johansson (Ghost World). Above all this, though, is the film's remarkable attention to details of place and time which, in writer/director Éva Gárdos' use of music and her overall attention to the finer points of production design, put me in mind of the similar all-or-nothing perfectionism of Martin Scorsese's GoodFellas. The two films couldn't have more dissimilar storylines -- there are no suave Henry Hill-type gangsters lurking around the edges here, although Johansson's character does come perilously close to falling into the dreaded teenage gang-deb category at one point. This is essentially a tale that revolves around a more traditional sort of love and family. Thematically, it's a far cry from Scorsese's mean streets. Still, it's hard not to note the areas, particularly in production design, where the two films overlap. An American Rhapsody has an unerring eye for the banal intricacies of 1950s pre-planned suburban neighborhoods, à la Levittown: folding-box phonographs, pickup-sticks, bundt cakes, welcome wagons, and beehive hairdos run amok, all set to Elvis and other musical icons of the time. Johansson plays Suzanne, the teenage daughter of immigrants Margit (Kinski) and Peter (Goldwyn). Members of the Hungarian intelligentsia and therefore slated for imprisonment or worse, Margit and Peter manage to flee Hungary with their other young daughter Maria but are forced by fate to leave Suzanne (at this early point in the film called Éva, and played by Endresz-Banlaki) behind. Éva is raised by a compassionate rural peasant couple, Teri (Zsuzsa Czinkóczi) and Jeno (Balázs Galkó), who immediately love their young charge as though she were their own. Back in America, Margit and Peter eventually construct a plan to reunite them with their daughter, a move that splits the now-6-year-old child's loyalties between her adoptive peasant family and her blood parents. Here Gárdos jumps ahead a decade to Éva in America -- now called Suzanne and played by Johansson -- in her midteens. Emotionally adrift somewhere between a dimly recalled past and a present constricted by a domineering, overprotective mother and the need to return -- or at the very least rediscover -- her roots, Suzanne's own Cold War, homefront battles are coming to an explosive head. Gárdos' film (which was based on her own childhood) manages to capture the immigrant experience from not one but three distinct viewpoints, with the end result being an extremely layered story that exists on multiple emotional levels. Kinski, an actress who has struck me in the past as acting too mannered for her roles, gives a studied and wholly affecting characterization as the frantic-to-assimilate Margit. Johansson, too, is fine in a role that requires her to leap from precocious kid to sullen teen to young adult. An American Rhapsody's only sore point is its apparent disinterest in Teri and Jeno's life in Hungary once Suzanne is reunited with her parents in America. What were two of the most interesting characters in the film all but vanish, though to be fair they do reappear in the final act. An American Rhapsody is one of those end-of-summer releases that tends to sneak in under the wire and exits theatres just as surreptitiously. Just because it doesn't have a serious marketing push behind it, however, is no reason to let it slip by.