Teenage wasteland

>> An American Rhapsody falls prey to clichés

by JOANNE LATIMER

An American Rhapsody may be a feature-film release this week, but it feels more like a textbook M.O.W. Could there be a more damning acronym in the film lexicon? Movies of the Week are the poor cousins of cinema, marred by melodrama and a cast of has-beens. Sure, they keep everyone in ball caps, but you usually can't credit them with more than writing paycheques for film technicians.

An American Rhapsody, for all its location shoots and authentic costumes, never comes off like a film for theatrical distribution. And it's one of those true-life, personal journey stories that you feel like a heel if you hate. Well, it's hard to hate An American Rhapsody--it's too predictable to inspire anything that strong--but it is boring and nostalgic enough to read like a diary entry. Director Eva Gardos had one hell of a childhood, but the film version doesn't do it justice.

The story is about Gardos' adolescence as a Hungarian refugee in America. Her parents (Nastassja Kinski and Tony Goldwyn) escape the communist regime, but have to leave one of their two daughters behind when the getaway plan goes awry. Suzanne grows up with a peasant family in the Hungarian country, while her real family thrives in modern California, frantically trying to get her out from behind the iron curtain.

Suzanne (played by the excellent Scarlett Johansson from Ghost World) is smuggled to America in the '60s at the age of five and begins the trippy experience of living in a fast-food culture with TV and Elvis. She turns into a rebellious teen, and flees to Hungary to escape her mother's over-protective rules.

Suzanne's fights with her mother are about as clichéd as the cigarettes she smokes so defiantly. Her father (Goldwyn) finds himself lodged between his quarrelling women, trying to avoid the landmines. He's forced into some dreadful lines ("She's just like you were at her age.") and Kinski doesn't fare much better, with "What were you doing out all night with that boy?" It takes a trip back to Hungary for Suzanne to realize she's now an American. She also learns the family secrets that stop her from hating her mother.

Gardos tries to do too much, filming everything from the escape scene to travelogue footage of Budapest. Gardos, a top-notch editor in Hollywood, is in need of her own services. An American Rhapsody, while intensely personal, needs an outsider's touch.