Before striking out for the hills of Anatolia near the end, Monsieur Ibrahim, confines its attention to the Rue Bleue, a narrow, slightly shabby street in a working-class section of Paris. Adapted from Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's novel (which was also made into a play), this modest, sentimental film looks nostalgically back on Paris in the mid-1960's and casts a loving, oblique glance at the French movies of that era.
At one point, Brigitte Bardot herself (played by a latter-day cinema sex goddess, Isabelle Adjani) shows up to shoot a few scenes on the Rue Bleue, where she wins the envious admiration of the local prostitutes.
For its part, Monsieur Ibrahim, written and directed by Francis Dupeyron, has a deci-dedly new wave look and feel, with street-level, hand-held cameras and bursts of French and English pop music on the soundtrack (including, as it
PHOTO: NY TIMES
happens, Richard Anthony singing the praises of the new wave in nouvelle vague).
Much of the music issues from a radio belonging to Momo (Pierre Boulanger), a Jewish teenager who lives in a state of low-intensity domestic war with his cold, depressive father (Gilbert Melki). In search of affection, and eager to grow up, Momo, at the start of the film, breaks open his piggy bank to purchase the services of a prostitute named Sylvie (Anne Suarez). While she and her colleagues function, in classic French-movie fashion, as both lovers and surrogate mothers, Momo also finds a second father in the person of Ibrahim (Omar Sharif), who keeps a small grocery store across the street from Momo's apartment.
The story of their cross-generational, cross-cultural friendship is introduced by an anthem to universal brotherhood (one of the musical specialties of those days) called Why Can't We Live Together? The question has hardly lost its pertinence, and Dupeyron, without overt didacticism, turns the story of an elderly Muslim and his young Jewish protege into a parable of tolerance and understanding.
The two central performances help the lesson go down easily, and Duperyon's unassuming, slightly ragged realism gives the movie a sweet, lived-in charm. Sharif, grizzled and white-haired at 71, has lost none of the charisma that made him an international movie star in the 1960's, and Boulanger, in his first feature film, shows impressive self-assurance. Sharif's character is, in some ways, a dubious conceit; he is the selfless repository of exotic Eastern wisdom whose main purpose in life is to shepherd his young friend through life's difficulties. In a Hollywood melodrama, Ibrahim would most likely be a spiritually gifted black man. But Sharif is a wry and subtle actor, and he gives the cliche some humor and life.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
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It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,
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