I didn't understnad....
I don't want to bombarded w/ negative responses, because I know this may be dumb, but, how could her gay friend be "in love with her?"
share1. Maybe he wasn't gay. His love of opera and theater reflected the way he was raised, not his sexual orientation.
2. His feelings for Channe might not have been sexual. He tells her he's in love with her, but he's 14 or 15, and she's his only friend. They have a very strong bond, and he may mistake this for romantic love.
I think either one is a distinct possibility.
What I didn't understand is why he just disappeared when the family moved back to the U.S. He was the major character and then poof! Gone. Did I miss something?
(I also didn't understand how a young man whose speaking voice had changed to baritone could sing in such perfect soprano. He wasn't singing falsetto (unless my ear deceives me) and he certainly wasn't a castrato so how could he do that?
Yeah, that was pretty weird how he just dissappeared, i don't like movies that do that. It's kind of like what A bronx tale did to to the mother in the movie, they never explain what happens to the character.
shareFrances didn't really disappear into thin air - Channe moved back to America. He was her best friend, and they had to say goodbye. I don't get why that was weird... the film is about different stages in Channe's life, and Frances wasn't part of her life anymore when they moved to the U.S.
shareFrancis was not gay (or was not not gay) - I think he was straight - but as for his singing, 'Voi che sapete' is from Le Nozze di Figaro (Marriage of Figaro) by Mozart and the role is a "pants part" so-called, it is usually sung by a young woman in a lower register because she is portraying a young man - the attempt is to sound like the pre-puberty clear clarion innocent sound - and the actor, Anthony Roth Costanzo, nailed it perfectly because he was young enough (14 at the time) to still sing in the register - he is in fact a gifted singer, opera was/is his forte, and that was his voice - I have never heard the part song by a male so I got a kick out of that - I am sure a year later he wouldn't have been able to pull it off -
there are a few male singers who can sing the old castrato parts without falsetto - the first time I heard one (Handel's Xerxes) it was annoying to me in the first act but by the third act I had gotten totally comfortable with it - I am not sure if Anthony Roth Costanzo can do it
he did his undergrad at Princeton in music, minor Italian, and is in the masters program for opera at the Manhattan School of Music - that kid has the chops to sing what was in this movie
I also wanted to know what happened to Candida, the housekeeper/governess/whatever she was. They made a point of bringing up that subplot of her romance with Mamadou, then she rejects his proposal of marriage and the Willises move back to America and she presumably gets another job. What happened to her romance? Was it a racism issue? Did she just not want to leave Channe and the others? Why even follow her romance at all -- she was only a minor character in the movie.
Too bad for her... the guy seemed so nice.
I think she was in the movie because she was part of what formed Channe's learning about love and relationships. Though Candida was not a major character in the movie, she was important to Channe. Young Channe called Candida her "second mother" after all. Seeing Candida turn away her one chance at love, and seeing her father comment negatively on it probably had an impact on Channe.
As to why Candida turned away her lover, I think it was in part because of her devotion to her Catholic faith, which she used to shelter herself from taking chances. I think she was just plain scared, and ultimately didn't believe she could have happiness. I don't think race mattered at all, mixed relationships had much greater acceptance in France than they did here in America during the '60s. It might have been put into the movie as another cultural divide Channe had to deal with in coming to America.
The movie makes it quite clear that the problem between Candida and Mamadou is children. She is already 40, and may not want children anyway, yet since he wants them, she wouldn't want to stand in his way.
shareMuch of this movie is about Channe forming close relationships with people and then having them suddenly disappear. Examples were Candida, Francis, and ultimately her father. Each of these were important to Channe's growing up. There were also issues about people changing and moving away for one reason or another. Channe's family embraced change and a certain lack of permanence. This was a big contrast to the small New England community into which her family moved, where all the kids probably knew each other from their first day in school and few kids moved away. With all this change, and with the contrasts between Paris and New England, how would Channe ultimately find some sort of permanence in her life?
But I would have to say the movie didn't always do a good job with all these transitions. I was often left wondering why one scene or another was in the movie (e.g., why so much time in the various French classrooms?). The transitions seemed even more abrupt than they are in real life and ultimately didn't come together to make the central theme stronger. To me the movie was closer to the series of deep emotional experiences that make an adult as remembered by the adult in that sort of personal shorthand we all develop about our lives, rather than about growing up as the child experiences it.
This is not just an invented story, but the real life story of the daughter of the man who wrote From Here to Eternity. So the events we see actually happened. The family returned to America. That's why the boy was no longer "in the picture".
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