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Buoyed by an Academy Award for Best Short Subject (Lieberman in Love) the gifted actress Christine Lahti made her feature directing debut with this genteel story about a very odd couple, written by Jill Franklyn, whose most prominent credit before this film was the “Yada Yada” episode of Seinfeld.

The talented Leelee Sobieski plays seventeen-year-old Goth girl Jennifer, whose divorced mother (Carol Kane) has all but given up on trying to communicate with her. It can’t be easy: Jennifer is obsessed with dark images and music and has punctured her body in a variety of unappealing ways. Then one day she happens upon an uptight, punctilious, forty-nine-year-old clothing salesman named Randall (Brooks) and something clicks. It isn’t sexual, as the film makes plain. She senses in him not just loneliness but an individuality that she can relate to and respect.

Randall is divorced and leads a quiet, orderly existence, but Jennifer makes it her mission to loosen him up and expose him to all sorts of new experiences. At the same time, he inspires her to clean up her act and lose the heavy mascara and mourning clothes.

None of this would be remotely convincing if we didn’t like the two actors and believe them in these roles. Brooks (who is underrated as an actor) has a steady stream of funny lines that aren’t simply wisecracks but utterances that perfectly suit his character. When she insists that he get a tattoo, he says to the artist, “I want the smallest tattoo you have. Can you give me a dot, or a period?” Sobieski, who is meant to be off-putting at first, becomes sympathetic as we learn about the influences that have shaped her young life. The more time these two people spend together on-screen, the more we accept their unusual friendship: they truly bring out the best in each other. (We also get to meet Jennifer’s father, played in broad comic fashion by John Goodman.)

The film has been criticized for surrendering to predictable plot turns, and if that makes me a sentimentalist, so be it. I cared enough about these people that I invested in them emotionally. My First Mister is a sweet, likable movie.

95. THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO

(1956)

Directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot

With:

PABLO PICASSO

CLAUDE RENOIR

HENRI-GEORGES CLOUZOT

Many great artists cannot explain how they do what they do, regardless of their medium. Asking a great sculptor how he achieves his results is akin to questioning a composer about his inspiration for the music that seemingly pours out of him.

In the 1950s, French filmmaker Henri-Georges Clouzot, best remembered for such thrillers as Diabolique and The Wages of Fear, convinced his friend Pablo Picasso to join him in an experiment. Clouzot set a camera on one side of a translucent canvas and had Picasso paint on the opposite side. The astonishing result allows us to watch the spontaneous creation of one picture after another, stroke by stroke. No questions are asked or answered, but we do have the rare privilege of witnessing a genius at work.

In the middle of the film, there’s a break where we get to see the filmmaking setup, and watch the (shirtless) artist from the other side of the easel. Clouzot even reveals some of his trickery; although the creation of a painting seems continuous, in fact he would stop the camera from time to time and (seamlessly) pick up where he and the artist left off. Inspiration was not a free-flowing process even for a genius like Picasso.

Not so incidentally, the cinematographer, whom we see in behind-the-scenes footage, is Claude Renoir, nephew of the great filmmaker Jean Renoir—and great-nephew of the illustrious painter Pierre Auguste. Claude worked with his uncle on such films as Grand Illusion, The River, and Elena and Her Men. It isn’t known whether Renoir or Clouzot came up with the idea of expanding the film from a standard frame to wide screen, but the transition is pleasing to the eye and must have been especially impressive in 1956 when CinemaScope was still fairly new.

The score for The Mystery