Screen

...The best scenes occur in Beirut...

...A key fight scene between them doesn't come across as a dramatically explosive revelation of contradictory feelings about her illness, but as an incoherent hash of all their previous marital problems...

...His obvious concern is not the battle between East and West but between tradition and modernity...

...Andrews makes her conflict of resolve and despair convincing, especially in scenes where she quickly shifts from Mary Poppins cheer to anguished, angry acknowledgment of her state...

...Menzel implies, at the least, that socialist managers are as capable of all the sins of progress that Westerners are...

...Alas, most of these scenes involve two male leads whose roles and performances seem flabby...

...Its premise is fraught with the danger of melodrama: Julie Andrews plays a gifted violinist suddenly crippled by multiple sclerosis...

...Nevertheless, Menzel keeps his balance, not just by returning to Otik and Pavek, but through the presence of a crusty, kindly old country doctor Skruzny (Rudolf Hrusinsky...

...The director's style is deliberately rural...

...The style of this documentary is as simple, direct, and substantial as its subject...

...But he is also an original, especially in his rambling poeticizing as he drives at leisure through the rolling Bohemian countryside, reminiscing about Czechoslovakia's past grandeur...

...A few terse shots reveal the city invading the country...

...During a cease-fire, Mother Teresa went to the aid of abandoned spastic children...

...Perhaps he says as much as he can or wants to in the "Gorbachev spring" of the past two years...

...His pacing invites us to sit back on a porch and have a beer in backwoods Bohemia, a place, he implies, that even modern urban Czechs have come to think of as "the old country...

...They have also structured perfectly its eighty minutes, dividing it equally between a survey of Mother Teresa's life and of the many missions where her nuns have set up houses of mercy, not just in her adopted home, Calcutta, but in the South Bronx, Guatemala, and other trouble spots...

...Often other speakers (besides Mother Teresa) are unidentified, even when on camera...

...As she continually instructs novices, a smile can be the ultimate work of mercy...

...Evident throughout is a fierce determination to ease the suffering of the poor and share their burden...

...TOM O'BRIEN 13 February 1987: 83...

...Their success is mixed...

...On the other hand, attempts to plan and administer mass corporal and spiritual works of mercy have often failed dismally because they lack the simple loving care for human beings illustrated so well here...

...Two New York women, Mary and Jeanette Petrie, directed and produced the film, wisely letting its subject and her work speak for themselves...

...All the villagers feel the attractions of progress (especially in omnipresent television), but the central story involves its ultimate rejection...

...Watching the documentary, one is impressed even visually by Mother Teresa's sari habit, with its blue striped border, and the way it seems to illustrate the simple but joyous attitude of her sisters...

...Their misadventures frame other village stories, mainly soap-opera love triangles involving jealous macho husbands, pretty wives, and handsome visiting scholars...

...Playwright/screenwriter Tom Kempinski and director Andrei Konchalovsky thus tackle the unenviable task of renewing the well worn "handicapped faces the world" genre...

...Cheerfulness is here reclaimed from "have a nice day" and returned to the realm of holy spirit...

...Marian Labuda is even better as the gruff teamster with a heart of gold...

...You have to piece together who they are...

...People still raise rabbits and pigeons there...

...we are responsible because we don't share...

...Rupert Everett shines as Andrews's brazen young violin student, not above cashing in his classical training for a year of good money...

...One technical weakness harms the film...

...Buetfor One is an offkey caper that only fitfully hits the right notes...

...But this is a minor problem...

...Menzel is right to focus on modernization and the heartless landscapes produced by urban developers under socialism or capitalism...

...The film thereby provides a constant sense of connection between personal 82: Commonweal biography and public achievement, between past and present...

...church steeples and roofs are round and graceful, a stark contrast to the squares and cubes of the city —especially the drab urban apartment complex that Otik might move to if Pavek sticks to his threat to get rid of him...

...Konchalovsky supplies Andrews with a musical past by resorting to some needless properties— posters, record albums, andZe/jg-like photos of Andrews with greats of the musical world...

...But he also photographs tremendous shots of Andrews watching her fingers betray her as she rehearses, and an even better sequence as she and Everett trek labyrinths beneath Albert Hall before a concert...

...Excellent mobile camerawork catches both the glamour and danger of a performance that Andrews looks toward with excitement and dread...

...It is Menzel's finest piece of mockheroic...

...Two Czech yuppies with a summer home in the village jog about or perform frenzied yard aerobics while their puzzled neighbors continue their rounds in the slow walk of the centuries...

...Less central male figures fortunately evade caricature and sometimes match Andrews's fire...

...In San Francisco, giving back some generous gifts for her new mission, Mother Teresa declares, "For us to understand the poor, we have to experience poverty.'' She also instructs her nuns to take literally Christ's words on the lilies of the field, and emphasizes her own reliance on providence...

...Theologically and politically, it might be easy to carp at some of these statements...

...The story centers on Otik, a grown orphan and village simpleton (Janos Ban), and the work partner he unintentionally but consistently sabotages, a truckdriver named Pavek (Marian Labuda...

...Like Tom Hulce in Amadeus (really, all things considered, a whitewash of the real Mozart), Everett provides a genuine if shocking portrait of the young virtuoso as a vulgarian...

...The film's depiction of the musical world encapsulates both its strengths and flaws...

...Such a move is made easier by the infidelity of her drunken, avant-garde composer husband, played with an all-too-credible alcoholic stupor by Alan Bates...

...But in truth, he might have pointed to events like Chernobyl as examples rather than blaming Prague's spoiled tastes on West Germany...

...Janos Ban, a Hungarian, plays the moron Otik perfectly, both compelling our sympathy and repelling our taste, thereby attaining just the right amount—and no more —of comic sentiment...

...He can't stand Otik's clumsiness, but relents on his threats when he sees that Otik's village home might be bought as yet another summer house by an urban bureaucrat...

...Skruzny, like the film, is part formula, and reminded me of "Doc"on Gunsmoke, the wise codger who knows everyone's secrets and tells none...

...An old pianist named Leonid (Sigfrit Steiner) is magnificently indifferent until the screenplay makes him mouth some stupidly reassuring lines...

...Large political issues are left tantalizingly unresolved in My Sweet Little Village...

...Mother Teresa, both a theatrical and public television release at Christmas, is innocent of any ideology...

...A junkman serves as a kind of Lady Chatterley's lover (between husband and shrink), but Liam Neeson (also in The Mission) raises the role above type...

...I wish that the movie had stopped there...

...Jiri Menzel (who directed the 1968 "Prague Spring" film, Closely Watched Trains) offers a gently ironic, affectionate look at the value of outdated rural ways...

...Chilling minutes in the children's hospital bring one face to face with what it means to perform such work...

...For the most part, Menzel is able to sustain this structureless structure, but at times (especially halfway through) he seems to be telling one story too many and repeating a few jokes too frequently...

...Max von Sydow plays a fidgety psychoanalyst whose non-treatment even a psychotic would flee, but the screenplay demands that Andrews fall in love with him...

...Mother Teresa makes just one reference to the cause of the problem she ministers to with such devotion: "Poverty is not created by God but by human beings...

...Sometimes one hungers for more, at least some reference by the documentary-makers to the tradition of Catholic social teaching...