This week is the annual Sarasota Film Festival, a time when we see movies we know little about and dip our toes into unfamiliar waters (appropriate given that this year’s theme is Sea & Be Seen!). Also we make a point of trying some new downtown restaurants.
CINEMA
The Unknown Girl. A Belgian feature film in French with subtitles, it’s about a young doctor who doesn’t answer her office door after hours and later learns that the young woman who buzzed her died across the street a short distance away. Haunted by what might have been different had she answered, she takes it upon herself to try to find out who the girl was and where she was from. We see Dr. Jenny Davin as a compassionate, caring, and mostly unrufflable individual who goes about seeing her patients, often at home, and then after hours is driven to seek answers about the unknown girl. Adele Haenel as Jenny gives a thoughtful, measured performance and it’s a film that will stay with you.
Menashe. After the gritty, grotty streets of a Belgian city, we became immersed in the life of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. In Yiddish with English subtitles, Menashe focuses on a recent widower who in trying to be faithful to himself while still being an observant member of his religious community, comes up against its strictures. He wants to have his young son live with him rather than with his brother-in-law’s family, but his religion says he must re-marry first. We see his fumbled and inept efforts at being an organized parent and his first foray into dating.
FRENCH FARE
Le Bordeaux. Sarasota has many more Italian restaurants than French ones, a surfeit in fact, so it was a pleasant surprise to find Le Bordeaux. Opened just a year ago, it’s on Main Street across from the Hollywood 20 movie theater, and has some of the friendliest restaurant staff I’ve encountered recently. The menu includes all the French classics you would expect: onion soup, snails in garlic butter, duck confit, coq au vin, beef bourguignon as well as other tempting selections. We enjoyed attractively presented green salads with Brie or chevre on toast followed by said duck leg confit and sautéed flounder with capers and tomato. The flounder came with a timbale of saffron rice and a somewhat mushy ratatouille. There is also a very reasonably priced 2 or 3 course set menu with several choices for each course. Overall, the food was good, but not exceptional. We will return! 
THEATER NOTE
We were at the Asolo production of The Little Foxes recently and it was excellent. It’s a play I’ve long wanted to see and seeing it makes me think about re-reading Lillian Hellman’s two memoirs, Unfinished Woman and Pentimento.
CREDITS: Header photo (salad at Le Bordeaux) by JWFarrington; Hasidic Jews photo by J W Kash; Le Bordeaux dining room from their website.
