Nora Ephron

Usually when a filmmaker dies, it is long after they have retired, and long after they made their last film. Not so with Nora Ephron, who died yesterday after having been ill for a long time. She was 71, and could very well have made several more films, and written more books and articles. Now she will not. That is a great loss because she was great at what she was doing. She was one of my favourite filmmakers from the last decades.

My love for Ephron has sometimes been met with surprise or disbelief, but there really is not anything strange about it. She made films that were funny, humane, moving and often lovely to look at. She had a delicate touch, and she knew how to capture the finer details of emotions. She could also be very funny.

She has written her fair share of modern classics, either directed by herself, or by men like Rob Reiner or Mike Nichols. She has been autobiographical, and she has been drawing on film and TV history. She helped to keep that history alive.

Billy Wilder and William Wyler allegedly said to each other after Ernst Lubitsch's funeral. "No more Lubitsch." "Worse than that, no more Lubitsch films." Ephron was obviously inspired by Lubitsch, and alas, now there will be no more Ephron films. Or rather, no new Ephron films. The old ones still live. A recurring theme in her films was that the past, and the dead, never really went away but were still with us. We can see that for example in Sleepless in Seattle (1993), Michael (1996), You've Got Mail (1998) and Julie & Julia (2009). Now her films will make sure Nora never leaves us.



(She wrote the script for Heartburn (1986) based on her own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She is called Rachel Samstat in the film, and is played by Meryl Streep. Bernstein, as Mark Forman, is played by Jack Nicholson. It is not a great film, but this scene is.)

See me earlier posts about Ephron:
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2009/10/nora-and-meryl.html
http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.co.uk/2011/07/youve-got-mail-and-nora-ephron.html

You've Got Mail and Nora Ephron

One reason You've Got Mail (1998) is so good is because it works on several levels.

It can be enjoyed as a typical romantic comedy.

It can be enjoyed as an essential part of Nora Ephron's oeuvre as an auteur. It has got the Ephron-esque combination of quirkiness and melancholia and it is rich with her typical motifs, such as the daily presence of dead loved ones and a strong connection between two people who have never met (compare it with Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and Julie & Julia (2009) for example). It is also filled with links, puns and references to older films, besides being a remake of Lubitsch's magnificent The Shop Around the Corner (1940).

And it is also a good, mature sociological study of city life in an era of neoliberal policies and the corporisation of the city landscape. The changes are hard and uncomfortable, but unfortunately often inevitable, and after we've fought and lost against the force of time, we must mourn and move on.

You've Got Mail can be appreciated on each of these levels, independently of the others, should you so wish, but combined they make the film so much richer.

So have a look if you haven't seen it before. As an example, here's a good scene (that won't embed).

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I've written about Nora Ephron before, with focus on Julie & Julia: http://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2009/10/nora-and-meryl.html

Nora and Meryl

There are not that many directors working today who's new film I want to see the very minute it opens. But one of them is Nora Ephron, and last Saturday I saw her latest film Julie & Julia, which has now come to Scotland.

Admittedly, I haven't seen Lucky Numbers (2000), and not much particularly want to either, but Ephron has a certain style and tone which I find bewitching, and that includes Bewitched (2005), although very few people liked it. She's got a delicate touch, and she makes her characters and images glow. Never more so than Sleepless in Seattle (1993), which, more than a romantic comedy, is a film about grief and loss, which it handles intelligently and very moving. Michael (1996) and You've Got Mail (1998) are also very good. I honestly couldn't say if I prefer Lubitsch's earlier version (The Shop Around the Corner 1940) or Ephron's.

And now there's Julie & Julia, which tells the kind of story that is so ridiculous that it has to be based on a true story. Which it is. It's the story of Julia Child, the tall American woman who, after having worked as a spy during World War II (if you google her you'll get links to CIA), went to France with her diplomatic husband, took a cooking class and then wrote a book which changed the way Americans cook their food. And it's the story about Julie Powell, who in 2002 started a blog, writing about how she cooked herself through Julia Child's cook book. Now, to be honest, which of these two stories do you find most interesting? Me, I couldn't care less for Julie Powell's blogging. And even though Amy Adams is good in the role of Julie Powell, it's just not why I bought the ticket. I wanted to see Meryl Streep as Julia Child. And I was not disappointed. That part of the film was tender, witty, moving and delicious, and these days that has gone since I saw it, the feelings it awoke in me has stayed on.

It's in many ways a Nora Ephron film, just as it is a Meryl Streep film. The Ephron part is for instance the little gestures and hesitations that tells so much but are so quiet and brief, like when Julie Powell mumbles her delight and affection for her husband, or the first scene which implies that Julia Child can't have children. There's also the very Ephronian concept of the film, of a person's life, unbeknownst to him or her, touching someone else's, of having the main characters hardly or never meeting.

The Streep part is obviously her performance. It's a complete makeover yet again, so rich in body language and syntax it's uncanny, without ever going over the top. She becomes the person she's playing, and gives the role so much depth and nuance. It's brilliant.

Here's Stephanie Zacharek review in Salon. (Good as always.)

And here's the real Julia, guest at Letterman: