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When it comes to making features, excellence in every area always leaves you gasping, especially when it is paraded by a young first-timer. It is as if writer-director Eric Mendelsohn dropped fully-formed from the sky. In fact his only full film experience, aside from working as the costume designer's assistant on five Woody Allen films, was a 26-minute short which travelled the world and had praise heaped upon it.
So has "Judy Berlin", and deservedly so. Although set on Long Island, it stares straight into the heart of archetypal American suburbia and wraps its strikingly authentic characters (involving the intelligent casting of some complete unknowns) in hyper-real imagery which captures the inward-looking nature of the key protagonists. Mendelsohn's choice of black and white only adds to the emotional power, and generally you feel gripped by what comes across like a very realistic dream.
Three principal storylines involving three family members develop and overlap as they highlight the unfulfilled hopes, dashed dreams, and soul-searching of a headmaster whose perpetual air of resignation matches his slow shuffle through the corridors, and through life; his wife, a simpering, girlish woman whose sense of failure causes her to be permanently distracted; and their son, a depressed, unsmiling introspective who has failed at Hollywood. The eponymous Judy, as well as a strange solar eclipse, breathe life into this anonymous town in a film which is haunting, perceptive and alert.
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