Themes: Race Relations, High School Life, Haunted By the Past
Main Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Claire Danes, Jude Law, James Van Der Beek, Kris Park
Release Year: 1997
Country: US/UK/DE/FR
Run Time: 92 minutes
Plot
Funded by the Ford Foundation, a one-act play by Wendy Kesselman about a teenage girl's coming of age was expanded to become the directorial debut of prominent casting director Billy Hopkins. Claire Danes stars as Daisy, a well-to-do but shy and bookish Manhattan teenager attending an exclusive prep school, keeping her Jewish identity a secret and harboring a secret crush on the school's star athlete Ethan Wells (Jude Law). The only person in Daisy's life that she feels comfortable opening up to is her grandmother, Nana (Jeanne Moreau), a Holocaust survivor who shares with her granddaughter an affinity for flowers. As Nana relates tragic stories of the horrors experienced in her youth (seen in flashbacks featuring Danes as the young Moreau), she becomes a guide of sorts for Daisy through her difficult adolescence. Ethan eventually notices Daisy's attention and begins courting her, but then Daisy's Jewish heritage is discovered by her snooty classmates, leading to a campaign of anti-Semitism and a truncated romance for the broken-hearted Daisy, who now needs Nana's compassion more than ever. ~ Karl Williams, All Movie Guide
The film is told through the stories of two women: Nana, a grandmother, and Daisy, her granddaughter. Daisy tells Nana of her romance with a young man named Ethan and her problems at school because she's Jewish; Nana tells the story of her young life when she was sent to a ghetto and then a concentration camp.
