Simon Magus

I've just watched the last 15 minutes of SIMON MAGUS for about the fourth time-- Sundance shows it all the time, and maybe that channel's programer intends to give it the exposure it should have had, years ago. One imagines Director Hopkins is a spell-binder-- to have coaxed the exceptional cast onto an under-financed backwoods Welsh location, and then gotten them on the same wavelength despite trepidations about looking silly in shtetl-garb and forelocks. Ordinarily I am deeply aversive to holy-fool fictions-- yet this one made me privy to an ethnic communal memory; the end-credits express thanks to Isaac Bashevis Singer, and one imagines him loving it (a 1972 documentary on him had the same mixture of tomfoolery and elegy). A tone-deaf earlier commentator decried the sound-track-- will bet you'll sit all the way through the scroll of names, listening to the last variations on a score that, like everything else about this film, is a lovingly precise devotional.