The feature film debut of 25-year-old James Gray, Little Odessa is a
modern American drama, an uncompromising tale of family, love, betrayal and
loss. Set in the mysterious, closely-knit Russian Jewish emigre community of
Brighton Beach, Brooklyn during one bleak winter,
Little Odessa is a richly atmospheric study of the last days of a proud
but tormented family.
Little Odessa stars Tim Roth as Joshua Shapira, a hit man for the organizatsya, the Russian mafia. Although still in his twenties, Joshua is a hardened criminal who is estranged from his family and banished from the streets of Little Odessa. Forced to go back to Brighton Beach for a hit, he is inexorably drawn back into his old world. Edward Furlong plays Joshua's little brother, a kid who is con-man enough to skip school for weeks without his parents finding out and who obviously loves -- even worships -- his enigmatic older brother. Moira Kelly stars as the young woman in the neighborhood who is drawn to Joshua, even though she knows how he makes his living. Maximilian Schell and Vanessa Redgrave are Joshua's aging parents, whose grip on the past will keep them from understanding the loyalty and violence that permeates their children's lives. Natasha Andreichenko, Russia's leading film actress, plays Schell's mistress, Natasha.
A coolly atmospheric tragedy in which gratuitous violence is avoided in favor
of richly observed characters, Little Odessa is stunningly photographed
by Tom Richmond. Shot entirely on location in Brooklyn and Manhattan during
last winter's monumental snowstorms, Mother Nature helped the Little Odessa
team create one of the most serenely haunting urban landscapes in recent
screen memory.
In September, 1994, James Gray was awarded the Venice Film Festival's Silver Lion trophy for Little Odessa; the Festival also honored Vanessa Redgrave with the Coppa Volpi for Best Supporting Actress.
With Little Odessa, first-time director James Gray introduces moviegoers to a place previously unchronicled on film -- present-day Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, a teeming, exotic neighborhood where Russian immigrants continue the rich traditions of their past while trying to make their way in a new and alien world. Filmed throughout Brooklyn during one of the coldest and snowiest New York winters ever recorded, the film eerily but appropriately made Brooklyn look more like the frigid, windswept Russian streets, the lost homeland of the Shapira family.
"If a film is to mean anything it has to be personal in the sense that it involves you on a deeper level," says Queens-born Gray. "It has to be intellectually and emotionally close to you. It has to probe a part of you that you're afraid of." Writing Little Odessa gave Gray the opportunity to explore loss and the devastation that a lengthy illness has on a family, while creating a milieu very different from the one he grew up in, but that had always intrigued him.
Gray says that in writing Little Odessa, he wanted to tell "a
story that deals with contemporary subjects but which has a timeless relevance.
It was very important to me that the story was unsentimental. This is the story
of a family that has never been able to communicate with each other and their
house is a place that has suffered a terrifying quietude that has slowly
destroyed them."
The main set of the film, the Shapira home, was in fact an actual Brighton Beach apartment. The production company rented it for the three week shooting period from a 77-year-old man who had lived there, with his family, for 55 years. The apartment, which reeked with its own formidable family history, lent the perfect atmosphere for the many difficult and poignant confrontations that take place there.
Gray acknowledges that the central character of Joshua is not a standard movie protagonist, someone that the audience easily identifies with. Says Gray, "Joshua is someone who has become so repressed that he's closed down emotionally. The film is about a person who is trying to re-establish himself, but of course his tragedy is that he can't succeed, because he's gone too far. I think Tim's performance really brings this all out -- he really captures this strong, abiding sense of irredeemability."
All of the actors in Little Odessa were drawn to the project's unique
story and chose to waive their normally high salaries. Acclaimed actor Tim Roth
was particularly intrigued by the dark complexity of the story and he was
challenged by the prospect of bringing Joshua to life. He found him "a
character that was extremely difficult to play. It's very hard to find sympathy
with someone like that, but that's my job as an actor."
For Edward Furlong, the part of Joshua's younger brother Reuben was a further opportunity to extend himself as an actor. "I liked this part because of the transition that Reuben goes through in the movie," he says. "By the end of the film he's had to grow up fast. He has to go from being a boy to understanding what it is to be a man."
At the core of the family relationships in Little Odessa is Maximilian Schell's character Arkady -- the proud, well-educated émigré who finds himself in an alien land, with two sons he doesn't understand and a wife dying of cancer.
"I always called him Prince Arkady Romanoff," says Schell. "He feels and behaves as if he's an aristocrat, but he finds himself selling newspapers and cigarettes on the streets of New York. He had a very different illusion about his life to the reality he finds himself living. And because of that, he has no idea how to deal with his children. He's the kind of man who read Pushkin or played Brahms and Mozart to his sons when they were in their cradles. He tries to teach his children instead of listening to them. He's a very egotistical father. He cannot imagine that his sons don't want the same things from life as he does."
While Schell approached his character by filling in the myriad details of his life, Vanessa Redgrave's brilliant portrayal of Irina, the once-strong woman now losing a battle with cancer while her family disintegrates around her, was achieved by using what could only be described as theatrical magic. Since Redgrave's part took only three days to film, she was not on the set for most of the production and did not have the luxury of soaking up the atmosphere of her character's world. For her scenes, she helped create her look -- drawn face, hair lifeless from chemotherapy -- her performance left the filmmakers, cast and crew mesmerized by her perfectly precise, moving and seemingly effortless portrayal.
Little Odessa was filmed during the worst New York winter in 150 years. "We had eight major snowstorms," says producer Paul Webster, who still wonders how they managed to finish the shoot on time. "Sometimes the snow was so deep we literally had to dig our way onto the set. Despite this adversity, perhaps because of it, this was a remarkably happy and cohesive unit -- the best film-making experience I've had."
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