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june 3–5, 2016 caramoor center for music + the arts

katonah, new york

The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse HallstrĂśm My Life as a Dog What's Eating Gilbert Grape The Cider House Rules Chocolat The Hundred-Foot Journey

“I have an affinity for eccentrics and outsiders, portraying them + not being judgmental about them.”

—Lasse Hallström

Table of Content s The Festival

[04]

Director

[06]

Venue

[10]

My Life as a Dog

[14]

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

[20]

The Cider House Rules

[26]

Chocolat

[32]

The Hundred-Foot Journey

[38]

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4 The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

The Festival A renowned and award-winning director, Lasse Hallstrรถm has a festival-worthy filmography, with classics such as What's Eating Gilbert Grape and The Cider House Rules. What ties all of his films together is the theme of the outsider making his own way in the world and, ultimately, finding his place amongst a band of fellow eccentrics.

This film festival celebrates misfits and unconventional families, just as Hallstrรถm has so lovingly done in his work. And so, we extend an invitation to you princes of Maine, you kings of New England, you weirdos, and kooks.

Welcome one and all.

Film Festival

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About

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

Lasse Hallström Born June 2, 1946 Stockholm, Sweden

Hallström started out in Swedish TV and directed many of ABBA’s music videos, before gaining critical acclaim for My Life as a Dog, which was Oscar-nominated for both directing and writing.

He has directed 4 actors to Oscar nominations: Michael Caine, Juliette Binoche, Leonardo DiCaprio and Judi Dench. Caine won for supporting actor honors for his low-key portrayal of a simple-hearted abortionist who runs a Maine orphanage and dies of accidental ether overdose in The Cider House Rules (1999). He has made his mark on Hollywood as a creator of sweeping, romantic films that still touch on real-life issues and heartache, while retaining a beautiful hope for humanity.

His influences and contemporaries include directors Tage Danielsson and Olle Hellbom, comedians Magnus Härenstam and Brasse Brännström, and the musical group ABBA.

7 Biography

Lasse Hallström is a Swedish film director and writer who is a perfect example of a foreign filmmaker who been successful in making the transition to Hollywood. He tells stories about unconventional families in a picturesque way. His films explore the themes of fitting in and finding home.

Director

In S earch of Aut hent icit y

Halls t röm’s Oeu v re [mis] fitting in

8 The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

A Guy and a Gal (1975) ABBA: The Movie (1977) Jagär Med Barn (1975) Tuppen (1981) Två Killar och en Tjej (1975) My Life as a Dog (1985) The Children of a Noisy Village (1986) More about the Children of a Noisy Village (1987) Once Around (1991) What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993) Something to Talk About (1995) Lumière and Company (1995) The Cider House Rules (1999) Chocolat (2000) The Shipping News (2001) An Unfinished Life (2005) Casanova (2005) The Hoax (2006) Hachi: A Dog’s Tale (2009) Dear John (2010) Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2011) The Hypnotist (2012) Safe Haven (2013) The Hundred-Foot Journey (2014)

Director

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Filmography

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

Caramoor Center for Music + the Arts Established in 1945 149 Girdle Ridge Road — Katonah, New York

Audiences are invited to explore the lush grounds, tour the historic Rosen House, enjoy a preconcert picnic, and discover beautiful music in the relaxed settings of the Venetian Theater, Spanish Courtyard, Music Room of the Rosen House, and the magnificent gardens.

Caramoor looks to a distinguished and passionate Board of Trustees, Advisory Council, Staff, and Artistic Directors to protect the legacy and nurture growth so Caramoor continues to thrive as a vibrant cultural resource and source of inspiration for all.

The story of Caramoor, the Rosens, Lucie’s Theremin, the Art Collections and its history is rich and diverse. Caramoor is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and is a notfor-profit organization.

11 About

Tucked away in New York's rustic Westchester County, Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts is a destination for exceptional music, captivating programs, spectacular gardens and grounds, and wonderful moments with friends and family. It enriches the lives of its audiences through innovative and diverse musical performances of the highest quality. Its mission also includes mentoring young professional musicians and providing educational programs for young children centered around music.

Venue

Where Music + Ar t Inspire

Accommo dat ions [mis] fitting in

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Bedford Post Inn 954 Old Post Road – Bedford, NY 10506 914.234.7800 Crabtree’s Kittle House 11 Kittle Road – Chappaqua, NY 10514 914.666.8044

The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

Renaissance Westchester Hotel 80 West Red Oak Lane – White Plains, NY 10604 914.694.5400 Doral Arrowwood Conference Resort 975 Anderson Hill Road – Rye Brook, NY 10573 914.935.6612 or 866.828.2020 Rye Town Hilton 699 Westchester Avenue – Rye Brook, NY 10549 914.939.6300 Elms Inn 500 Main Street – Ridgefield, CT 06877 203.438.2541 Stonehenge Inn 35 Stonehenge Road and Route 7 – Ridgefield, CT 06877 203.438.6511 West Lane Inn 22 West Lane – Ridgefield, CT 06877 203.438.7323 SpringHill Suites 30 Old Ridgebury Road – Danbury, CT 06810 203.744.7333 Holiday Inn Danbury 80 Newtown Road – Danbury, CT 06810 203.792.4000 Holiday Inn Mount Kisco 1 Holiday Inn Drive – Mount Kisco, NY 10549 914.241.2600

Homestead Inn 420 Field Point Road – Greenwich, CT 06830 203.869.7500

Westchester Marriott Hotel 670 White Plains Road – Tarrytown, NY 10591 914.631.2200 LaQuinta Inn 94 Business Park Drive – Armonk, NY 10504 914.273.9090

13 Accommodations

Tarrytown House 49 East Sunnyside Lane – Tarrytown, NY 10591 1.800.553.8118

Venue

Summerfield Suites 101 Corporate Park Drive – White Plains, NY 10604 914.251.9700

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

“It could have been worse. I’ve been kind of lucky. I mean, compared to others.” —Ingemar

My Life as a Dog

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December 12, 1985 Drama, based on a novel by Reidar Jönsson Starring Anton Glanzelius, Melinda Kinnaman, + Tomas von Brömssen Academy Award—Nominated for Best Director + Best Adapted Scrrenplay A boy is sent to live with his uncle in a country village when his mother falls ill. He finds refuge from his misfortunes and unexpected adventure with the help of the town’s warmhearted eccentrics.

Production Details

My Life a s a Dog

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The cinema of Lasse Hallström, always toeing the fragile line between sincere tenderness and full-blown schmaltz, is most affecting when immersed in the complexities of childhood experience. My Life as a Dog is a wondrous children’s story that organically overlaps the magic of youth with the harsh realities of impending adulthood. In the story of Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), an inquisitive young boy forced to spend the summer in the countryside so his sickly mother can recuperate from tuberculosis, Hallström fosters the themes of isolation, mortality, and compassion. Instead of sentimentalizing Ingemar’s emotional highs and lows, My Life as a Dog relishes the ambiguities inherent to his impressionable gaze, the gaps in his memory that seem as natural and cyclical as the changing seasons.

The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

While death is a constant in My Life as a Dog, it’s never sensationalized as a morbid curiosity or gimmick.

Instead, Hallström focuses on the ripples of mortality, how Ingemar connects his personal anguish with experiences of loss from supporting characters. Despite its contained 1950s rural setting, the film references the world at large through Ingemar’s contemplation of other people’s experiences with tragedy. Random newspaper stories from around the world define his frank voiceover narration, which comes during hypnotic cutaways of the starry night sky. Hallström creates a juxtaposition of separate temporalities and experiences to structure Ingemar’s tangential thought process, a way for both character and audience to make sense of events that often defy expectation.

Fields of green grass, crystal clear streams, and dense forests frame these moments, as Ingemar spreads his wings away from the heartache of his mother’s sickness. It’s always clear the adult world and its conflicts are unfolding simultaneously on the fringes of Ingemar’s heightened childhood experience, but these are merely momentary distractions to the overall world of play. In a way, Hallström relinquishes the pace of the film to his child protagonist, and Ingemar’s meandering thoughts often splinter without notice to incorporate whatever his impression of the world becomes at that particular moment. This makes for a beautiful and incomplete vision of one boy’s subjective act of remembrance.

My Life as a Dog

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Film Review

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“I can’t go back + label myself as an outcast because I was a pretty welladjusted kid, but I can certainly relate to the feeling of being an outsider.”

18 The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

—Lasse Hallström

My Life as a Dog

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Quotable Insight

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

“Well, we can go anywhere...if we want.” —Gilbert

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

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December 17, 1993 Drama, based on a novel by Peter Hedges Starring Johnny Depp, Leonardo DiCaprio, + Juliette Lewis Academy Award—Nominated for Best Supporting Actor In a backwards Iowa town, young Gilbert is torn between taking care of his troubled family & a girl who shows him new possibilties for his life.

Production Details

Wh a t ’s E a t i ng G i l b e r t G r a p e

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In the small but eventful world of Gilbert Grape, emergencies are a natural state. He is more or less equal to these challenges, but life is not easy for him. What helps is the small town itself. In a big city, we sense, the Grape family would be isolated and dysfunctional, but in Endora, where everybody knows everybody and Gilbert fits right in, life is more possible, and the family is at least quasifunctional.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape makes of these materials one of the most enchanting movies, a story of people who aren’t misfits only because they don’t see themselves that way. Nor does the film take them with tragic seriousness.

The special quality of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is not its oddness, but its warmth. Johnny Depp, as Gilbert, has specialized in playing outsiders (Edward Scissorhands, Benny and Joon), and here he brings a quiet, gentle sweetness that suffuses the whole film. Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Arnie, the kid brother, has been nominated for an Academy Award, and deserves it. His performance succeeds in being both convincing and likable.

We can see both why he’s almost impossible to life with, and why Gilbert and the rest of the Grapes choose to, with love.

Films like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape are not easily summarized; they don’t have that slick “high concept” one-sentence peg that makes them easy to sell. Maybe all all of this still leaves you wondering what the movie is about. But some of the best movies are like this: they show everyday life, carefully observed, and as we grow to know the people in the film, we find out something about ourselves. The fact that HallstrÖm is able to combine these qualities with comedy, romance and even melodrama make the movie very rare.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

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Film Review

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

25 Quotable Insight

“I can understand the rage with wanting to completely escape everything you know + start a new life.”

—Johnny Depp

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

“Sometimes ya gotta break some rules to put things straight.” —Arthur Rose

The Cider House Rules

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December 17, 1999 Drama, based on a novel by John Irving Starring Tobey Maguire, Charlize Theron, + Michael Caine Academy Award—Nominated in 7 categories, winning Best Supporting Actor + Best Adapted Screenplay

A compassionate young man, raised in an orphanage and trained to be a doctor there, decides to leave to experience life outside and find his place in the world.

Production Details

The Cider House Rules

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

The need to be of use, the discovery that the official rules and real-life rules of how to behave rarely coincide—these and other life lessons that our innocent hero learns may sound like the tritest of homilies.

But The Cider House Rules gives them the depth and emotional weight of earned wisdom and that is what sets it apart.

29 Film Review

The film is a beautifully-acted, gentle fable about a young man’s journey into the world, loss of innocence and acquiring of values that reflect the lessons learned on his journey. It is a sustained meditation on the dream of “home sweet home” that gnaws at the heart of its orphaned main character Homer Wells (Tobey Maguire) as well as the hearts of the other children who grow up in St. Cloud’s. The film hammers home the message that that growing up means coming to the realization that in a cosmic sense we are all orphans.

The Cider House Rules is an unabashedly sentimental film that wants to pluck our heart strings.

The performances have an understated gravity and the screenplay a thematic consistency that largely avoid tawdry manipulation. The film is drenched in an oak-gold ’40s New England ambiance that is so intense you can almost taste the sour-apple pungency of the orchard air. That ambiance, along with the idealized romance of the gung-ho daredevil flyer and his honey-blond sweetheart, gives the film a slightly mythical quality that harmonizes with Mr. Irving’s subtly literary screenplay and the director’s softhearted child’s-eye vision.

The Cider House Rules

The world according to Irving is a little like touring a parallel universe where fate is determined not so much by abusive parents as by wondrous tragicomic events beyond the realm of psychology. I can’t think of a better filmmaker to guide us through that world than Lasse HallstrÖm, a director who shares Mr. Irving’s adult-child sensibility. In Mr. HallstrÖm’s lovely adaptation, the author’s fantastical world of wonders and the director’s tender-hearted compassion mesh into what is easily the finest film realization of an Irving novel.

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“On looking for the humanity in even the most flawed characters, it’s an interest in finding the moments that are not expected, the moments we recognize + can relate to.”

—Lasse Hallström

The Cider House Rules

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Quotable Insight

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

“I think we’ve got to measure goodness by what we embrace, what we create...and who we include.” —Père Henri

Chocolat

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December 15, 2000 Romantic drama, based on a novel by Joanne Harris Starring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Lena Olin + Johnny Depp Academy Award—Nominated in 5 categories, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, + Best Actress A woman and her daughter open a chocolate shop in a small French village that shakes up the rigid morality of the community.

Production Details

Chocolat

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Chocolat is about a war between the forces of paganism and Christianity, and because the pagan heroine has chocolate on her side, she wins.

Her victory is delayed only because, during Lent, a lot of the locals aren't eating chocolate.

The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

The movie takes place "once upon a time" in a French village where utter tranquillity, by which is meant stagnancy, has reigned since time immemorial, until "a sly wind blew in from the north," bringing with it Vianne (Juliette Binoche), who opened the chocolate shop, after which nothing was ever again the same. Vianne's chocolates contain magic ingredients like the foods in Like Water for Chocolate, and soon her shop is a local healing center.

The film is both charming and whimsical, and Binoche reigns as a serene and wise goddess. Like Catherine Deneuve's, her beauty is not only that of youth, but will carry her through life, and here she looks so ripe and wholesome that her very presence is an argument against the local prudes.

Whether her character has deeper agendas, whether she is indeed a witch, as some believe, or a pagan priestess, as she seems to hint, is left unresolved by the movie—but anyone who schedules a fertility celebration up against Easter Sunday is clearly picking a fight.

Chocolat is the sort of movie you can enjoy as a superior fable, in which the values come from children's fairy tales, but adult themes have been introduced. It goes without saying in such stories that organized religion is the province of prudes and hypocrites, but actually Chocolat is fairly easy on the local establishment—they're not evil people, although they resent outsiders; they're more like tranquil sleepwalkers who wake up to smell the coffee, or in this case, the chocolate.

Lasse Hallström is a director that is gaining a reputation for being fond of creating movies that make audiences think. Hallström loves to throw curve balls. The Cider House Rules reveled in half-truths and moral mindbenders. Chocolat follows close behind.

Chocolat

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Film Review

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“People are sometimes more afraid to be alive than to be dead.

So it’s just a matter of opening up + allowing life; choose what you want to do and be.”

—Juliette Binoche

Chocolat

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Quotable Insight

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The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallstrรถm

“Why change a recipe that is two hundred years old? Maybe two hundred years is long enough.” —Hassan Kadam

The Hundred-Foot Journey

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August 8, 2014 Comedy-drama, based on a novel byRichard Morais Starring Helen Mirren, Om Puri, Manish Dayal, + Charlotte Le Bon Golden Globe Award—Nominated for Best Actress

A feud occurs between two adjacent restaurants in a French town: one operated by a recently relocated Indian family and the other a Michelin-starred, haute cuisine restaurant.

Production Details

The Hundred-Foot Journey

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40 The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

The Hundred-Foot Journey is a culture-clash dramedy that presents itself as the most soothing brand of cinematic comfort food. This genteel adaptation of Richard C. Morais’s 2010 novel about two rival restaurants operating in a sleepy French village is not without its pleasures—a high-energy score by A.R. Rahman, exquisite gastro-porn shot by Linus Sandgren, the winningly barbed chemistry of Helen Mirren and Om Puri—all prepared to exacting middlebrow specifications and ensured to go down as tastily and tastefully as possible.

The film caters to a broad array of arthouse appetites.

A crowd-pleaser with its very cozy temperament, the new film represents familiar territory for director Lasse Hallström, whose film Chocolat centered around the triumph of sensual indulgence and liberal tolerance over stifling small-town conformity. The culture war examined in The HundredFoot Journey contrasts the heat and intensity of Indian cooking with the elegance and refinement of French haute cuisine, then balances the two with a feel-good lesson in ethnic harmony and community.

The film tells a story in which cultural opposites not only learn to coexist, but are in fact triumphantly and even romantically reconciled. It is an underdog story that brings us into an irresistible world of culinary sophistication and features gorgeous nighttime views of Paris, where Hassan eventually arrives in search of his destiny.

Mirren is superb at both projecting an air of hauteur and expressing the vulnerability beneath it, and she brings out a similar mix of pride and feeling in Puri’s Papa, an excellent sparring partner whose stubbornness and drive to succeed never come at the expense of his love for his family.

Shot on 35mm in luminous, sun-dappled tones in the French village of Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val (with some second-unit work in India), the film is also distinguished by its mouth-watering visual buffet, whether lingering on vats of steaming red curry or a perfectly plated pigeon with truffles. This is, no question, an easy picture to succumb to.

The Hundred-Foot Journey

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Film Review

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“This accent doesn’t go away; my culture doesn’t go away.

I’m still an outsider in America + that certainly brings a familiarity to this story for me.”

42 The conventions we break + the families we make in the films of Lasse Hallström

—Lasse Hallström

The Hundred-Foot Journey

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Quotable Insigh

Fo r m o r e i n fo r m a t i o n, v i s i t :

www.misfitting.in

www.caramoor.org