Shirley MacLaine can not only lay claim to a past existence, it also seems she's living a few lives simultaneously. How else can her "Inner Workout" video, featuring a glowing statute that looks as if it were stolen from Caesar's Palace, be reconciled with...

MADAME SOUSATZKA -- Directed by John Schlesinger, screenplay by Schlesinger and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala based on Bernice Rubens' novel. Starring Shirley MacLaine, Navin Chowdhry, Shabana Azmi, Peggy Ashcroft, Twiggy, Leigh Lawson, Geoffrey Bayldon, Robert Rietty, Lee Montague, Jeremy Sinden,...

["Madame Sousatzka" is a] strange little story, set in London, about an eccentric piano teacher (famous for her Method) who polishes an amiable eleven-year-old prodigy's technique (he spends weekends at her Hyde Park house, which, despite its stylish address, is decaying) and then finds herself (along with her odd batch of boarders) loath to surrender him to success in the form of a crass, tin-eared impresario. This second novel by Bernice Rubens was first published in England in 1962; ...

Madame Sousatzka has received a warm welcome that I wish I could join in. But I found the story of the child pianist with his cannibal mother, his devoted, autocratic teacher and the smooth impresario too sugary. The supporting eccentrics did not convince me that they were anything except properties and neither little Marcus's pianistic brilliance nor the melancholy insight of his teacher seemed to me to have much to do with music or human relations. Jewish warmth and humour and colour and passion fo...