Film
Movie theaters, reviews and showtimes in Chicago, plus articles, trailers and more
- Home
- Box Office
- Listings
- Trailers
- Features
Bookmark this page- Edition:
Left Luggage (1997)
Director: Jeroen Krabbé
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Holland, 1972. To pay the rent, a young Jewish student protester (Fraser, effervescent) reluctantly takes a job as nanny with a Hassidic family and falls in love with their hitherto silent five-year-old son (Monty). She stays on for the boy's sake despite battling with the paterfamilias Mr Kalman (Krabbé) and the apartrment's sneering janitor. As director, Krabbé refrains from giving the ever-darkening tale a portentous air. Furthermore, he shows a sure hand with the actors: coaching Rossellini to reveal a quietly humane, unglamorous stoicism as Mrs Kalman; keeping the freshness in Fraser's performance; and teasing fine cameos from Topol, as the girl's wise, reassuring friend Apfelschnitt. The trouble lies with the script (from Carl Friedman's novel The Shovel and the Loom), which propels the story like a fizzling three-stage rocket. It begins jauntily as a study of a young woman's search for self, before occupying itself with the relationship between the nanny and the sealed-off boy, and finally mutates into an examination of the divided wings within Jewry, using tragic events as a reminder of the shared history of suffering.Author: WH
Cast & crew
Director: Jeroen Krabbé
Producer: Ate De Jong, Hans Pos, Dave Schram
Cast: Isabella Rossellini, Maximilian Schell, Laura Fraser, Jeroen Krabbé, Marianne Sagebrecht, David Bradley, Adam Monty, Chaim Topol, Miriam Margolyes full cast
Duration: 100 mins
Features
Gray's anatomy
James Gray wants to push buttons—again.
The next big thing?
Gigantic Releasing tries to rethink indie distribution…without movie theaters.
Red Diva: Lyubov Orlova, First Lady of Soviet Cinema
So you think you can dance, comrade?
Puppet master
Coraline director Henry Selick takes stop-motion animation into 3-D.
Socratic method
Laurent Cantet's approach on the set matches the message of his film.
Wander woman
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy puts a Bush-era spin on the road movie.
Oscars
Read our interviews with the nominees, our reviews of the nominated films and more.
What do you think?
Post your review now