Not Much More Than Tears in ‘The Man Who Cried’

Sally Potter likes to see men weep.

In the director’s elegant romantic drama “The Tango Lesson,” a female filmmaker and a male tango dancer consummate a relationship with the silent exchange of a tear. It is a memorably expressive choice that sends off more heat, and heart, than any sweaty bout in the sack could hope to convey.

In Potter’s “The Man Who Cried,” a father and daughter share a wealth of tears after being separated for more than a decade. Despite the emotional weight of the reunion, and the lachrymal flood that ensues, the encounter feels curiously anticlimactic.

The lack of potency may be partially attributed to the fact that the daughter is played by Christina Ricci, who joins Paulette Goddard in “The Great Dictator” in that select society of Hollywood actresses who have attempted to soften their hard-chippie personas by playing demure Jewish ragamuffins swept up in the diaspora.

Casting against type has its rewards, but it also has its limits: The world is not champing at the bit to see Madonna’s Tzeitel in “Fiddler on the Roof,” either. Ricci’s sourpuss presence, however, is not entirely to blame for the unkempt historical saga that is “The Man Who Cried,” which takes us on a strange trajectory from the Russian pogroms of the 1920s to the Hollywood studios of the 1940s.

The film’s efficiently told early sequences (dynamically shot by the estimable Sacha Vierny) follow a small girl named Fegele as she is separated from family and shtetl in the attempt to escape to America. Fegele winds up in England, where she is renamed Susan and assimilated into the status quo by her adoptive Christian family.

In 1939, a teenage Suzie (Ricci) takes a cabaret job in Paris, where she comes to embrace her roots again with the negative reinforcement of a gold-digging Russian chorus girl (Cate Blanchett, behind epic red lips) and a fascist-sympathizing Italian opera star (John Turturro in his grandstanding mode). Suzie’s identification with the Other is cemented when she falls in love with Cesar, a gypsy horse trainer played by Johnny Depp, who hereby exhausts his gypsy vagabond quota for the duration of the 21st century.

There is even less going on between Ricci and Depp here than there was in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” mostly because Potter gives them nothing to play. Both Suzie and Cesar are essentially reactive characters, as much victims of underwriting as they are of persecution.

This ends up being the film’s undoing, since Ricci’s peculiarly brittle talents require articulation in order for them to come alive. As Ricci broods and glowers, Blanchett walks off with what’s left of the picture. “The Man Who Cried” may move those who break up at the first sound of Bizet’s “Je Crois Entendre Encore” from “The Pearl Fishers.” It’s played so many times you’ll be singing, if not weeping, out the door.

*

MPAA rating: R, for sexuality. Times guidelines: Mature subject matter, strong language dealing with anti-Semitism.

‘The Man Who Cried’

Christina Ricci: Suzie

Cate Blanchett: Lola

Johnny Depp: Cesar

John Turturro: Dante Dominio

Universal Pictures and Studio Canal present a Working Title production, in association with Adventure Pictures, released by Universal Focus. Writer-director Sally Potter. Producer Christopher Sheppard. Executive producers Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner. Cinematographer Sacha Vierny. Editor Herve Schneid. Costume designer Lindy Hemming. Music Osvaldo Golijov. Production designer Carlos Conti. Art director Laurent Ott, Ben Scott. Set decorator Philippe Tulure, Maggie Gray. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.

At selected theaters.