MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Mina’ Finds the Meaning of Friendship

For much of “Mina Tannenbaum,” French filmmaker Martine Dugowson makes you wonder why she didn’t call her film “Mina and Ethel,” since it’s the story of two women, both born in 1958, who meet at age 7. But by the time the film is over you understand only too well why it bears the title it does, although on screen Mina and Ethel are of equal importance.

You come away understanding much more, for this is a major film on the meaning of friendship. Dugowson, a cinematographer in her smashing feature-directing debut, leaves us with a heightened awareness that the most important of friendships can be fragile and possess limits and that friendship, like life itself, is invariably provisional. This is a real depth-charge of a movie, one that you can’t--and shouldn’t--easily shake off.

Movies don’t get much more deceptive than “Mina Tannenbaum.” Dugowson invites us to assume that we’re going to see a cozy, intimate little movie that the French are so good at--one that will be a vehicle for two of France’s brightest young stars, Romane Bohringer and Elsa Zylberstein, both of whom are consistently dazzling. Dugowson makes us forget how skilled the French also are at pulling the rug out from under us--even when providing some hints of what’s to come right at the start.

Dugowson, who won a best screenplay award at Cannes in 1992, hopscotches over the decades, but most of her story, set entirely in Paris, takes place in 1974 and 1989. At 16, Bohringer’s Mina is already set on a career as a painter but is convinced that she’s homely, although we can see the beauty behind the thick glasses. Zylberstein’s Ethel, who’s not sure yet what she’s going to do with her life, is also clearly a beauty--but, in her friend’s accurate estimation, is about 25 pounds overweight.

When Dugowson cuts to 1989 she shows us a chic Mina, who’s discovered contact lenses, has had a lover for four years--and predecessors to him--and is experiencing acclaim as an artist, while Ethel has slimmed down but is struggling to break through as a free-lance journalist. This first glimpse of Mina is misleading: She hasn’t got it made as an artist, and she’s actually mired in her teen-age self-image.

Dugowson has let us know from the start that Mina and Ethel are both Jewish but hasn’t made anything of it, letting us accept the information as matter-of-factly as we take note of the color of the women’s hair. Dugowson in time reveals a crucial distinction: that while we shouldn’t make a federal case over anyone’s religion or anything that makes him or her a member of a minority, we must deal with whatever makes us in any significant way different from the majority.

Dugowson rightly brings a bittersweet humor to Ethel’s all-too-familiar predicament of the overbearing mother adamant about her daughter marrying a Jew. In a stunning moment we discover that the crucial chasm between Mina and her mother, a child of the Holocaust, is that she cannot understand how her daughter could possibly be unhappy--that she doesn’t even have the right to be so.

“Mina Tannenbaum” belongs to its radiant stars, but Nils Tavernier and Jean-Philippe Ecoffey excel as key men in the women’s lives. Finally, Dugowson makes every minute count of her handsome film’s substantial 128-minute running time.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: There’s little sex and violence in this French-language film, but it’s too intense and complex for preteens.

‘Mina Tannenbaum’

Romane Bohringer: Mina Tannenbaum

Elsa Zylberstein: Ethel Benegui

Jean-Philippe Ecoffey: Jacques Dana

Nils Tavernier: Francois

A New Yorker Films release. Writer-director Martine Dugowson. Line producer Georges Benayoun. Cinematographer Dominique Chapuis. Editors Martine Barraque, Dominique Gallieni. Costumes Yan Tax. Music Peter Chase. Art director Philippe Chiffre. Set decorator Pierre Decraen. In French, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.

* Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles. (310) 478-6379.