THENEWYORKER, MARCH 23, 2020 69
NEWYORKER.COM
Richard Brody blogs about movies.of apology addressed to a disgruntled
employee. Again, you can feel the film
coiling in upon itself; it’s almost as if
Kore-eda, whose films hitherto have
been locked into Japanese mores and
habitations, doesn’t yet trust himself to
dramatize the broad expanses of French
society, and therefore trains his gaze in-
ward, upon the woes of this one fam-
ily. Note also that it’s a standard-issue
family, complete with parents and kids,
whereas the adults in Kore-eda’s previ-
ous movie, the wonderful “Shoplifters”
(2018), shivered with uncertainty; their
dwelling place was little better than a
shack, and a rescued runaway was treated
like a daughter. No such worries for Fa-
bienne and her clan. Charlotte is safe,
legitimate, and adored, and the cushion
of wealth could not be plumper.
Despite these shortfalls, there’s much
to relish here. To play a guy like Hank,
who must resign himself to being sec-
ond or fourth fiddle, is a tricky task, but
Hawke pulls it off in the quiet style that
he has made his own, and there’s an
easeful moment when Hank and the
others (even Fabienne), emerging from
a restaurant by night, slip into an im-
promptu dance as they mosey down the
street. In the end, however, this is the
Catherine Deneuve show, and I can al-
ready hear the meows of catty delight
with which audiences will greet the
scene where the topic of great actresses
comes up. Many of them, it’s pointed
out, have had double initials: Greta
Garbo, Danielle Darrieux, Anouk
Aimée. How about Brigitte Bardot?
somebody asks, and Fabienne answers
with a moue. Not just any moue, either,
but a supermoue—a whole cultural at-
titude distilled into a single boffff. And
yet Fabienne, though frosty, is not im-
permeable, and in the final minutes,
with the seasons changing and the leaves
falling, she lifts her immaculate face to
the winter light. Something stirs within
her, even now, beneath the ice.W
hen a movie called “The Book-
sellers” comes along, you can’t help
pausing over the title. Might it be Mob
slang? You can imagine a Martin Scor-
sese film in which “bookseller” means a
guy in a dusty jacket, whose job is to pop
other guys, smack in the flyleaf, leaving
the cops badly foxed. As it is, “The Book-
sellers”—a new documentary, directed
by D. W. Young—really is about people
who sell books, though they are, in their
way, as implacable as gangsters. Show
them a copy of “Moby-Dick” in which
Melville has doodled little cartoon whales,
and they’ll cut your throat to get it.
There’s no narrative to the film. It’s
more of a social event: a congregation of
the faithful, whom we first encounter at
the New York International Antiquarian
Book Fair, in the Park Avenue Armory.
The dealers’ mission, one declares, is to
“inculcate neophytes into the wonder of
the object of the book.” (Translation: get
the suckers hooked.) We glimpse one
volume containing mammoth hair; an-
other covered in human skin, with teeth
embedded in the cover; and a librar-
ian doll, “with Amazing push-button
Shushing Action!” We meet the collec-
tor Justin Schiller, who was still in sev-
enth grade when he lent some of his
L. Frank Baum material to Columbia
University, and the three graceful sisters
who rule over the Argosy Book Store, on
Fifty-ninth Street, having jointly inher-
ited the throne from their father, LouisCohen. If King Lear had gone into the
book trade, he could have saved himself
a world of grief.
Young confines most of his movie
to New York, opting to travel backward
in time rather than far afield on the
map. We hear of A. S. W. Rosenbach,
for instance, the portly Pope of book
dealers, who, despite downing a bottle
of whiskey a day, maintained a sharp
eye for incontestable treasures. Few busi-
nesses attract a more loyal gang of mono-
maniacs, bound and tooled in eccen-
tricity; Fran Lebowitz, interviewed in
the film, remembers crabby old dealers
“who were very irritated if you wanted
to buy a book.”
One should never try to tell a mov-
ie’s fortune, but I suspect that “The
Booksellers” will end up preaching to
the choir—to those of us who are patho-
logically incapable of passing a used
bookstore without entering. We want
to be greeted by a complete set of Wal-
ter Scott’s Waverley novels, so uncov-
eted that they might as well be glued
to the shelf, and by the distinct air of
cat that pervades even those premises
where no cat has ever trod. Such holy
shrines are now themselves a rarity, and
Nancy Bass Wyden, co-owner of the
Strand, has done the numbers. “In the
nineteen-fifties, there were three hun-
dred and sixty-eight bookstores in New
York City,” she tells us. “Today, I went
and counted—there are seventy-nine.”
Do not be misled by the comic charm
of this film. It’s a ghost story, brooded
over by the rustling wraiths of book-
stores dead and gone. THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.
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