The new film “Tony” opens with a young Anthony Bourdain (Dominic Sessa) sitting in an interview for a writing fellowship. The curly-haired Vassar student spins up a laughable book pitch only an English major could love — a dialogue between Jack Kerouac and George Orwell written on a single sheet of paper that Bourdain describes as a “Building Romans” [sic].

Malapropism aside, “Tony” is a great example of a bildungsroman — a story that chronicles a character’s moral and emotional growth, often on the verge of adulthood. In that first scene, director Matt Johnson (“BlackBerry”) captures many of the adjectives that could be used to describe the future celebrity chef, who passed away in 2018: brash, inquisitive, sensitive, pretentious, self-destructive. 

By the end of “Tony,” which takes place over a single summer Bourdain spent in Provincetown, a young Tony is still all of those things. But he finally has a sense of direction, one that would eventually lead him to the upper echelons of the culinary world.

After failing to land the fellowship despite telling his parents it was a near-lock, Tony heads to the Cape, chasing a high school crush, Nancy (Emilia Jones, “CODA”), who he has thus far mostly failed to impress. Upon discovering she already has a boyfriend, Tony does the only sensible thing and gets blackout drunk. After ending up in the gutter, he’s rescued by the unnamed Chef (Antonio Banderas), who not only lets him sleep on his hammock, but allows him to wash dishes in the kitchen of his tourist trap restaurant.

If Chef is the angel on Tony’s shoulder, giving him discipline and structure, then Sal, the restaurant’s oyster shucker, is the devil. Played with a louche Masshole charm by Leo Woodall (“The White Lotus”), Sal is 100 percent id. Riding out his shift one bump of coke at a time, Sal spends every non-working moment drinking, fighting, and screwing with abandon. (He even cuts a notch out of each girl’s door every time he gets lucky, keeping them in a jar in the kitchen.) It’s easy to see why an impressionable Tony is pleased to have Sal as a wingman, and his schtick always toes the line between cheeky and dangerous.

Sessa, who was plucked from obscurity at Deerfield Academy to play a complicated coming-of-ager in “The Holdovers,” is excellent as Bourdain. He tells everyone who will listen that he’s a writer, not realizing how transparent his leather jacket and mispronounced ten-dollar words really are. Sessa gives Bourdain an edge, furious at the world for his failure to manifest a lifestyle that he barely understands. But he also imbues him with a burgeoning curiosity, spending many hours off the clock picking up tips and tricks from Chef.

“Tony” is by no means a documentary, with Johnson and co-writers Matthew Miller, Todd Bartels, and Lou Howe’s script focusing on the emotional truth of a young Bourdain rather than drilling down on the particulars. Bourdain arrived in Provincetown in 1972, yet we see 1975’s “Jaws” on a movie marquee, and Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” (1976) soundtracks a particularly high-energy scene.

Along with a number of additional period-appropriate needle drops (The Modern Lovers, Brian Eno), the film’s score is a standout, with Johnson’s sketch comedy partner Jay McCarrol weaving in a melancholic piano that gives the film its spine. And for an indie film with a modest budget, “Tony” looks spectacular: The warm, nostalgic feel of 1970s Provincetown is beautifully captured by cinematographer Michael Bauman (“One Battle After Another”), who used older, wider lenses to achieve the film’s grainier texture. It feels like every scene was shot during the golden hour of a picture-perfect Cape summer day.

“Tony” loses steam a bit near the finish line when Bourdain veers away from Chef and back to Sal, who has moved on from coke to harder vices. Bourdain, who died by suicide at age 61, was candid about his heroin addiction during his life. But Johnson chooses to elide any drug use by its protagonist, letting Sal be the lone on-screen sinner. It’s a respectable choice, but the cuts feel obvious. And as Tony begins to draw Nancy closer, it highlights how under-used Jones has been in the role. In reality, Nancy played an outsized role in Bourdain’s life, but here she is more an object of desire than a fully realized character.

But those story choices do little to dim the overall mood of “Tony.” In telling the story of a complex man whose demons were evident, Johnson and co. have gone a slightly safer route without completely whitewashing Bourdain’s life story. By limiting the focus to a single summer in Provincetown, Bourdain – and the audience – are given a very welcome happy ending.

Rating: *** out of 4

“Tony” opens in limited theaters Aug. 14, before expanding on Aug. 21.

A wealthy Greek shipping magnate hosts a lavish celebration for his daughter on his private island while secretly plotting to control her future and his own legacy in The Birthday Party, opening in Prague cinemas this weekend after premiering at last year’s Locarno Film Festival. This striking psychological drama from writer-director Miguel Ángel Jiménez, adapted from Panos Karnezis‘ acclaimed novel, boasts an arresting central performance by Willem Dafoe and gorgeous Mediterranean scenery, but its intimacy is undercut by a central flaw: we don’t really care about any of these people.

The Birthday Party opens in flashback, as Marcos Timoleon (Dafoe) learns of the death of his 18-year-old son in a plane crash at sea. By 1975, Marcos has transformed his grief into an all-consuming obsession with his family, his fortune and, above all, his legacy. He brings together an assortment of wealthy friends, political associates and hangers-on for the 25th birthday of his daughter Sofia (Vic Carmen Sonne), whose relationship with young English writer Ian Forster (Joe Cole) threatens to disrupt the future Marcos has carefully envisioned for her.

There’s a deliciously sinister setup here, somewhere between an Agatha Christie mystery and a Greek tragedy, as Marcos quietly manipulates the people around him while everyone else tries to figure out exactly what he is up to. Dafoe is perfectly cast as the Onassis-like patriarch, a man whose enormous wealth has given him the power to make everyone around him feel like a subordinate simply by raising an eyebrow. The actor’s performance is commanding without being showy; even his softest lines carry the implicit threat of someone who has never had to hear the word “no.”

The problem is that the film’s psychological drama doesn’t give us enough reason to care about the characters. Karnezis’ novel tells the story of Timoleon’s entire life, closely mirroring the biography of Aristotle Onassis, and gives us the context necessary to understand how this man became the person we see at the party. Jiménez and co-writers Giorgos Karnavas and Nicos Panagiotopoulos strip away almost all of that history to concentrate on the titular celebration. It’s an understandable choice, but it leaves Marcos frustratingly opaque.

We learn about him almost entirely through conversations with the other characters, or through what those characters say about him. The central conflict of a wealthy patriarch confronting his own mortality and attempting to ensure that his legacy survives through his daughter and her future children is potentially fascinating, but the film gives us precious little access to the man experiencing it.

Instead, much of the immediate drama centers on Sofia, particularly her relationship with Forster, who has been working on a biography of her father. This makes her seem like the protagonist for long stretches, even though Marcos’ machinations are ultimately driving the story. Once his intentions become clear, much of the mystery disappears, leaving the film with relatively little narrative momentum.

Yet The Birthday Party remains compelling almost entirely because of its cast. Dafoe is terrific, effortlessly establishing Marcos’ authority over everyone around him. Watching him negotiate with the colorful collection of people he has assembled on his island is often more interesting than the plot itself: He can dismiss someone with a glance, or completely change the temperature of a conversation with a seemingly innocuous remark.

Emma Suárez is also excellent as Marcos’ soon-to-be-ex-wife Olivia, who maintains an unexpectedly close relationship with him despite their impending separation. Christos Stergioglou (Dogtooth) brings weight to Marcos’ longtime friend and doctor Patrikios, while Sonne and Cole give the younger generation a necessary sense of volatility. The ensemble is first-rate, even when the script doesn’t seem to give them much to do.

What the screenplay lacks in narrative weight, however, Jiménez makes up for with an extraordinarily polished visual presentation. Cinematographer Gris Jordana makes the most of the film’s locations in Corfu, standing in for Marcos’ private island, with additional studio work in Athens. The widescreen compositions are immaculate, moving from sun-drenched Mediterranean exteriors to sultry nighttime parties and elegant interiors.

There’s also a wonderful tactile quality to the production design and the use of color. Jiménez understands that this world of extreme wealth should look almost unreal, and the film’s images frequently resemble photographs from a particularly decadent dream. Even during the later stretches, when all of Marcos’ cards are on the table and the mystery has largely evaporated, the visual design remains enough to keep us watching.

The same is true of the music. The score by Alexandros Livitsanos and Prins Obi blends Greek-influenced sounds with propulsive 1970s party rhythms. It gives the movie a unique identity and provides a momentum that the screenplay sometimes lacks.

There’s a wonderful sense of ancient tragedy lurking underneath all of this modern wealth and decadence. Marcos has spent his life acquiring everything he could possibly want, only to discover that money cannot protect him from mortality. His attempts to control his daughter’s future are ultimately an extension of that same impulse: If he can control what happens after his death, perhaps he can somehow defeat death itself.

But the film never quite transforms that idea into the emotional punch it seems to be reaching for. The Birthday Party is much more successful as a portrait of a fascinatingly powerful man than as a drama about the people surrounding him. When the film asks us to care about the consequences of Marcos’ decisions, we are too often left at an emotional distance.

Still, there’s enough here to recommend, particularly for arthouse audiences. Jiménez has created a strikingly composed psychological drama with a superb central performance, beautiful photography and an excellent score, and the final rendition of Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood by Dafoe, backed by the Czech Studio Orchestra, recording from Prague, is an appropriately flamboyant cherry on top. The Birthday Party may not give us enough of Marcos Timoleon’s life to fully understand him, but watching Dafoe rule this little kingdom is a party worth attending.

(JNS) – Look up the word “tough” in the dictionary (if people do such things anymore), and you might just find a picture of an Israeli. Tougher yet, an Israeli woman. Hardened by circumstances, history, work, wifedom, motherhood, and loss after loss, they have come to symbolize the sabra, a desert cactus prickly to the core.

Nobody knows this better than an Israeli man.

That, in short, is the theme of a new movie in English and Hebrew, “For the Love of a Woman,” released in mid-July. It’s based on “The Loves of Judith,” a 1994 novel by Israeli writer and newspaper columnist Meir Shalev, who died in April 2023, just months before the editing of the film finished that September.

The story opens in Rhode Island in 1978, with two estranged sisters in a hospital waiting room, struggling to make small talk as their mother lay dying. The elder one, Esther (“Etty”) Horwitz – divorced, childless and working as a “stewardess” in San Francisco – is handed a small Styrofoam cup of vending-machine coffee, peers into it and states blankly, “There’s milk in it.”

She throws her married sister with children a sour look, setting the stage for disappointment to come.

Esther is willed a handwritten letter from their mother, along with an enclosed Yemenite pendant, dated Oct. 4, 1932, and a torn photo of her as a baby with their father in Haifa, in what was then British Mandatory Palestine.

It’s a mystery of sorts, instructing Esther to travel back to her birthplace to find a woman named “Yehudit” who lived in a farming settlement and some answers to the reason she never quite fit into her family and her own skin.

“When I first read her part, I thought, she’s so annoyed and so annoying,” said Mili Avital, 54, the Israeli actress who played the part of Esther. “But when you’re far from your own truth, you’re unsettled. It’s almost like there’s a piece missing. And she doesn’t understand the source of it, which this journey she’s embarking on is all about. It’s going to bring her to the truth.”

The story weaves its way from the 1970s to the 1930s and Yehudit.

Avital’s character is indeed an outlier. She lives in California, on the opposite coast from her family; she flies the skies for work, with few permanent connections. “She’s both a foreigner in the United States because she feels different, and then she comes to Israel, and she really is a foreigner; she’s a tourist,” says Avital.

‘The themes are universal’

So, too, was the film’s Italian director, 66-year-old Guido Chiesa, in Israel for the first time for the project. A Catholic, he says he was always interested in the country and its history, both geographically and religiously.

He was there for a few months in 2022 and at the beginning of 2023. Joint screenplay writer Nicoletta Micheli, who is also Italian, scouted for a location to film; yet modern-day Israel has become very modern. Most of the locales were either too built-up to reflect immigrant life in the early 20th century or, in some places, like an abandoned Syrian army base in the Golan, too close to borders and potential rocket fire to be secure.

And so, Sicily became the backdrop for much of the film – namely, the fictional moshav of Beit Caleb. Parts of southern Italy housed farmers in communal villages called “agro-towns” in the 1930s through 1950s.

When Yehudit Salomon, an attractive young woman who’s deaf in her right ear, arrives there, the place is never the same.

“This film, to me, is incredibly universal,” says Avital. “I mean, it has a specific worldview and a specific character, but the themes of it are universal.”

A main theme is inherent misunderstandings, and the inability, for many men, to understand the psyche and concerns of women, and perhaps most of all, their emotions. Men often shy away from the depths of a woman’s pain, either because they don’t know how to approach it, or in some cases, don’t want to.

That has left Yehudit and Esther proverbially wandering in the desert. But it doesn’t seem to affect their spirit, which becomes stronger with every obstacle they face.

“It’s a testament to the times when the movie takes place,” says Avital. “You had to be tough to stand up to all these men and to carry on” amid some very real threats: physical, sexual, mental, emotional.

Add to that the “plain hardship of both trying to and then having a family. That’s a very relevant and important theme,” she says. “It’s like the name of the film – what people do for the love of a woman and what a woman does for the love of herself.”

The deeper meaning that runs through it, Avital points out, is that even in the darkest moments of history, people fall in love, give birth, build families and form communities.

‘It’s a story about hope’

The segue between Esther and Yehudit becomes clearer as the saga unfolds. Esther seeks out several people in Israel to help her uncover lost history, while Yehudit wrestles with men who profess their love as she keeps the past to herself.

Men can have a hard time “being retrospective, looking inside themselves,” says Chiesa. “We have a hard time seeing the other person, learning from the other person, being able to listen to the other person. Not all of them, of course, but generally.”

Chiesa said he was captivated by the era he was filming and the early Jewish pioneers. “They were very idealistic, in a way. They wanted to have a land, they wanted to have a country; they wanted to build a new society, a freer society. It was a unique experiment.”

Soon after editing was completed, Israel was roiled by the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. From that moment on, he says, no European festival wanted to screen the film. Eventually, using Chiesa’s domestic clout, they managed to distribute it in Italy, where it won the Best Film Award at the Bari International Film Festival, known as the “Federico Fellini” Award for Best Movie.

Even now in Europe, it’s very hard to talk about the film, says Chiesa. “There’s so much antisemitism going on … I understand that people are afraid of bringing up the word ‘Israel.’ It has become more and more complicated.”

Still, Chiesa doesn’t shy away from the facts, stating plainly that “Jewish culture and heritage are at the roots of Western society.”

He says “without Israel, without the Torah, without Abram – all the way up to Jesus – there wouldn’t be Western society. I think that’s something we should treasure, rather than condemn without thinking about all the aspects of it, all the aspects of the complicated situation in the Middle East right now.”

He enjoyed being there, he says, pointing to the deserts and the demographics. “Israel, from what I understood by visiting it and working there, is a very complex society,” he says. “Not all people think the same. There are people that are in favor of one position and people in favor of another position; it’s a democracy. And everyone has a say. They have a vote.”

The way he puts it, it almost doesn’t sound so complicated. It is encapsulated in his directorial skills. What’s left unsaid comes together in the end.

“It’s a story about hope against all odds,” states Chiesa.

Esther, he explains, goes from being “an unresolved woman, a very fragmented woman, a person that is unable to love. And then she learns that a tragic event happened in her family, and she’s able to change.”

Finding the truth about herself and her family history allows her to be a freer person. And that, he says, “is something we all believe in deeply.”

In the letter that sets up the story, Esther’s mother writes: “I believed it was important for you to go on this journey, wherever it may have taken you. It was your right. I hope this story allows you to make peace with many things.”