Sally Potter's (The Tango Lesson) films always seem to be about the visuals more than any kind of structured story, and The Man Who Cried isn't one bit different. It tells the story of a Jewish girl traversing the globe in search of her beloved father and is set against the backdrop of World War II and the Holocaust (can somebody please create and enforce an annual ceiling on the production of WWII/Holocaust films?). The picture has a pretty decent cast – it's kind of the indie version of America's Sweethearts' A-list stars - but little annoyances like dialogue and chemistry bog down each of the fine actors and actresses in a somewhat harebrained story.

Set in 1927, Cried opens in a Russian shtetl that is full of thin guys with beards, thick-ankled women with babushkas, and kids who look normal but will evolve into one of these two kinds of adults. One of these children is Fegele (Claudia Lander-Duke), the daughter of the village cantor (Oleg Yankovsky) and the apple of his eye. Fegele's papa heads for America with the intention of bringing the rest of his family to the New World once he saves enough money. But shortly after he leaves, the shtetl is burned to the ground, and the wide-eyed Fegele is smuggled into England with only a photograph of her dad and a couple of coins sewed into her dress.

Upon arriving in the UK, Fegele is renamed Suzie and handed off to a gentile family who sends her to a Catholic school that literally beats the Yiddish out of her. Cried flashes forward about 10 years, when an older Suzie (a slimmed-down Christina Ricci, Sleepy Hollow) hightails it away from the parents to whom she apparently never developed any kind of attachment and heads for Paris, where she becomes a dancer in a theatre company owned by Felix Perlman (Harry Dean Stanton, The Green Mile). But Suzie is able to keep her Jewish past a secret, thanks to the English accent flogged into her by the Church and her adoptive parents.

Suzie also befriends fellow Russian dancer Lola (Cate Blanchett, The Gift), who will do just about anything to land a man with money; and Cesar (Ricci's Sleepy Hollow co-star Johnny Depp), a Gypsy horse-trainer for the theatre. Johnny Depp as a gypsy living in France? That seems like such a stretch. As in Chocolat, Depp doesn't show up for a while, and when he does, he barely has any lines. And like Sleepy Hollow, there isn't much chemistry between he and Ricci, but each offers more wordless glances at which to shake a stick. Silent stares only get you so far, though.

I loved the beginning of the film, especially Lander-Duke's Ponette-esque performance, and I admired the fact that, unlike Heartbreakers' Sigourney Weaver, Blanchett's Russian accent didn't sound like Natasha from The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show, even though, as Suzie's alter ego, her character is grating (the film could have also been called Shut Up Lola Shut Up). Cried looks fantastic (cinematographer Sacha Vierny has shot the last nine Peter Greenaway films) and sounds great (Osvaldo Golijov's score includes a terrific song from Requiem For a Dream's Kronos Quartet). But other than that, there isn't too much happening, other than a lot of lip-synching.

Basically, Cried is about a girl in the throes of an identity crisis. Suzie feels guilty about hiding her Jewish roots, and her heart breaks when she sees the way the Gypsies are treated, but outing yourself as a Jew and befriending the Gypsies as the Germans advance on Paris are a sure way to get yourself tossed into the oven.

And just who is the titular crying man? Is it Suzie's father, weeping because he was separated from his daughter? Is it Cesar, sobbing because he knows his Gypsy family is likely to be wiped out? Or is it me, bawling because I sat through the whole blasted thing?

1:37 –

for sexuality