The Revolving Doors

From New York, sensitive Quebecoise Celeste (Spaziani) sends her memoirs - spanning 50 years or so in her journey from provincial '20s immaturity to Big City jazz life - to her abandoned middle-aged son, taciturn painter Blaudelle (Arcand). Most of the action, or inaction, takes place in his flat as he stares into space - ah, memory! Blaudelle's son Antoine (Méthé) is a lonely, bright boy, disturbed by his parents' estrangement (there are explanatory scenes in parks with Miou-Miou as his mother); intrigued, he sets off to find his grandmother in the mean bars of New York. Mankiewicz directs this dull essay on memory and generational separation with an enervating sensitivity that borders on obscurity. Symptomatic is a lengthy, central flashback set in and around a local silent cinema where Celeste, a classically inclined musician, takes a job providing piano accompaniment; presumably intended to illuminate the broadening of her musical, intellectual and emotional horizons, it explains nothing.