Lumet’s Familiar ‘Stranger’

“I’m a cultural, not a religious Jew, but when I smell anti-Semitism I become more Jewish than ever,” director Sidney Lumet says firmly. “And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to do this picture.”

That would be “A Stranger Among Us,” Lumet’s 38th, which is officially in competition in the Cannes Film Festival. The story of a tough (is there any other kind?) New York cop played by Melanie Griffith, whose views of life undergo a considerable change when she goes undercover to solve a murder in a Hasidic Jewish community, “Stranger” also affected the sensibility of its director more than he anticipated.

“Imagine me, an atheist, an intellectual New York Jew, reading Talmud for the first time after all these years,” he says, chuckling. “I started using more Yiddish in my speech and my intonation changed. My wife, who is WASP heaven and whose people literally came over on the Mayflower, looked at me and said, ‘Is this what I have to look forward to, an old Jew, as we go down life’s path to a glorious old age?’ ”

A former actor who debuted on the Yiddish stage (where his father, Baruch, was a major star) at age 4, and who “heard Hamlet in Yiddish before I heard it in English,” Lumet definitely believes “the signs are unmistakable” that anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States. And so when producer Howard Rosenman sent him Robert Avrech’s script, originally called “Close to Eden,” he not only agreed to do it, he found himself so involved in pre-production that he feels “I’ve never worked so hard on any picture I’ve ever done.”

Part of the reason is that the task of re-creating the insular, intensely religious world of Hasidism, a sect with not only very particular views of God but also a distinctive way of life and dress, “was like doing a period picture set in the court of Louis XIV.”

More than that, Lumet says, “Stranger” “would be the first view an awful lot of people have of a life even most Jews don’t know about (and) I wanted to get it right. I remember when I was doing Paddy Chayefsky’s ‘Network,’ the script had a lot of technical TV terms, stuff even I hadn’t heard of and I’d worked on a lot of TV. Orion’s Arthur Krim wanted them out but Paddy said, ‘They’re not going to know what they mean but they’re going to know they’re right.’ ”

From an acting point of view, the most daring aspect of “Stranger” is Lumet’s decision to cast Eric Thal--an actor so new he’s not only never made a picture before, he’s not even appeared in a professional play--in the key role of Ariel, the Hasidic rebbe’s spiritual son. “Thank God I found him, because I was stuck,” Lumet says. “He came in to read for a smaller part and it was extraordinary. Certain parts of acting come from the individual’s persona, and with Eric I’d never seen such equanimity. Nothing threw him.”

“Stranger” is softer in tone than Lumet’s other films involving New York cops, gritty epics like “Serpico” and “Prince of the City,” and the director says that’s because “to me it wasn’t a police story but a story about someone who opens up after exposure to a whole new set of values. Having Melanie’s character be a cop was just a quick and easy way to establish her as a tough cookie. Melodrama to me is a device, a clothes hanger on which to display a story.”

Other films have been more controversial, more analyzed, more idolized, but no film has out and out entertained more people at this festival than “Strictly Ballroom,” a musical from Australia that was such a smash at its midnight debut that the applause lasted 15 minutes and was followed by literal dancing in the aisles. It’s that kind of film.

Set in the wacky world of competitive ballroom dancing and telling the deliciously delirious story of a daring young man who just has to dance his own steps and devil take the consequences, “Strictly Ballroom’s” crowd-pleasing abilities are such that it has quickly been sold to territories all around the world from Iceland to Israel and, though a deal has not been finalized, it will probably be the only film signed up by an American distributor before the festival closes.

All that has left the film’s director, Baz Luhrmann, in somewhat of a daze. A cockeyed tribute to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films of the 1940s, “Ballroom” has been in Luhrmann’s life for a full eight years now, and it’s notable not only for its success, but for how many different forms it’s existed in and how narrowly it escaped being turned into a totally different kind of picture.

“Ballroom” started life as a half-hour student play. That evolved into a full-scale professional production that won a pair of prizes at a major Czechoslovakian theater festival. Yet, even though its fantasy style is its greatest asset as a film, Luhrmann very narrowly staved off attempts to turn it into a more naturalistic piece, complete with a bitter strike at a factory.

“The initial push was to give it social comment, to make it more like ‘Dirty Dancing,’ where things are more like real life and what happens has to be somehow justified by things like an abortion,” the director explains. “It was ludicrous, I personally hated it but because we had no clout I had to spend a full year writing that screenplay to prove it couldn’t work.”

Everyone here is glad he did.