Left Luggage

For yet more proof that every actor who wants to badly enough will some day be a director, look no further than this personal statement from B movie baddie Jeroen Krabbé. Set in 1970s Antwerp, which was apparently peopled entirely by English and German-accented folk, Left Luggage follows the coming of age of Chaja (Laura Fraser), daughter of two Holocaust survivors (Maximilian Schell and Marianne Sägebrecht) who deal with their pain by becoming obsessive-compulsive, he with his quest to find two suitcases buried before the war, and she with constant baking, weaving, and guilt-tripping of her daughter ("Don't you know that tight jeans give you cancer?"). Despite being "fed up with this whole Jewish thing," Chaja's desperation for money leads her to take a job as a nanny for a strict Hasidic couple (Isabella Rossellini and Krabbé, leaving the actual acting to his Hasidic hairpiece). Chaja quickly strikes up a deep and intimate bond with their youngest son, Simcha (Adam Monty), a redheaded, freckle-faced tot with an adorable penchant for pants-wetting. Soon enough, Chaja starts respecting folks who are more uptight than she, and Simcha starts to open up for the first time in his life. Meanwhile, the older generation try to confront and/or deny their memories of the concentration camps. While it would be too much to ask for a movie about Holocaust survivors to actually be happy, Krabbé is way too heavyhanded in trying for a tragic atmosphere, so much so that it's impossible to be moved by the climactic crisis, which is so drastic that it feels completely unreal. Needless to say, the cast is what makes the movie worth watching. Schell, Rossellini, and Sägebrecht are predictably strong, as is (Chaim) Topol as Chaja's elderly mentor. The kid is insufferably cute, but Fraser holds her own among the heavyweights much as she did in Titus, and newcomer David Bradley is a hoot as a surrealistically difficult building concierge.