It was necessary to have a certain impudence to become a director with the surname Cassavetes, inherited from the father of John Cassavetes, the classic innovator of American cinema. It was necessary to have a certain selflessness, so that with such an appearance – height 198 cm, shoulders oblique fathom, severe and romantic blond Nordicity – to quit acting career. He had to have something to shoot about, something to root for in order to become a director.
It was necessary to have a certain impudence to become a director with the surname Cassavetes, inherited from the father of John Cassavetes, the classic innovator of American cinema. It was necessary to have a certain selflessness, so that with such an appearance – height 198 cm, shoulders oblique fathom, severe and romantic blond Nordicity – to quit acting career. He had to have something to shoot about, something to root for in order to become a director.
The latter was not an obstacle: for Nick Cassavetes, cinema is a unique way to talk about pain. After all, everything can be told in words: facts are perfectly verbalized. But not pain – there are no words for it, only an artist, and a mise-en-scene, and some kind of miserable vase over the hero’s shoulder, which, with its inappropriate pretentiousness, will suddenly take and express how bad the hero is. The heroes of Cassavetes Jr. do not trust words, they are tongue-tied, they vacillate on the verge of poor reason and great feeling. And they say only a simple thing about their feeling: “She is so beautiful …” This is the name of the most famous film by Nick Cassavetes – with Sean Penn, Robin Wright and John Travolta. In it, the hero Penn returns to his beloved from a mental hospital. And she’s already married to someone else. For a good man who understood: “she is so beautiful” the opponent means much more than his own. Because it is involved in the pain of lost years, but has not grown old. Because the opponent feels deeper. And because the heroes of Cassavetes so naturally exist on the verge between the pain of life and the grace of life. After all, Cassavetes knows something important about this sweetness with bitterness – about the feeling of the fullness of life with the full acceptance of its finiteness.
His new film “My Guardian Angel” has an amazing plot for today’s cinema – an existential one: a 13-year-old girl sues her parents after learning that she was conceived “in a test tube” with the specific goal of becoming a “parts store” for her older sister, leukemia patient. The girl protests against this royal gift – life, because it was done insincerely. And the path goes to another gift – the realization that she herself can give life.
Cassavetes again follows the route from bitterness to forgiveness. And on this path he finds companions … here: 16-year-old Sonya Vasilyeva, the daughter of Russian scientists and a promising American actress, fearlessly shaved her head for the role of a leukemia patient. What her more eminent young colleague Dakota Fanning categorically refused.
“My guardian angel”
Cast: Alec Baldwin, Abigail Breslin, Sofia Vasilyeva, Cameron Diaz, Jason Patric.
In theaters from 13 August.