Peaked Cap: for people who don't dare to wear a beret
Friday, August 12, 2011
Everything Is Illuminated
It took me years (and an email from Canadian beret enthusiast Jamie) to realize that Eugene Hütz, one of the main characters in the film Everything is Illuminated, wears a beret (a Kangol beret, to be precise). A great movie with an even greater mix of music, from punk to Balkan, hip hop to classic and many traditionals in between.
A young man takes a strange and unexpectedly funny journey in
search of a family heroine he's never known in this screen adaptation of the
novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Jonathan (Elijah Wood) is a lifelong collector
of any and all objects pertaining to his family, and he has become obsessed
with a woman he's never met. The woman saved the life of his grandfather during
World War II, when the Ukrainian town where he was born was destroyed by Nazi
troops.
Wanting to know more about the woman, Jonathan flies to the
Ukraine, where with the help of a hip-hop obsessed, gold-toothed tour guide and
translator named Alex (Eugene Hütz), Alex's grandfather (a chauffeur who has
claimed to be blind since his wife's death, played by Boris Leskin), and a dog
named Sammy Davis Junior Junior, Jonathan searches for the meaning of the
present that lies buried in the past, unexpectedly shedding the same such light
on the lives of those around him.
Everything Is Illuminated was the first
directorial assignment for acclaimed actor Liev Schreiber.
Daan Kolthoff is a writer, living between the hills of Wellington, New Zealand and, when not writing, meditating or walking the hills, he is usually researching, reading about or ordering berets from around the world.
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