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Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video

The Capitol Complex of Bangladesh

MY ARCHITECT
Directed by: Nathaniel Kahn.
Produced by: Susan Rose Behr & Nathaniel Kahn.
Written by: Nathaniel Kahn.
Director of Photography: Robert Richman.
Edited by: Sabine Krayenbühl.
Music by: Joseph Vitarelli.
Released by: New Yorker Films in assoc. with HBO/Cinemax Documentary Films.
Country of Origin: USA. 116 min. Not Rated.
With: Frank O. Gehry, Philip Johnson, Nathaniel Kahn & I.M. Pei.

Accessible and compelling - feeling at times more like a feature film than a documentary - Nathaniel Kahn's beautifully moving My Architect takes you on an emotional journey in search of his father. Nathaniel is the illegitimate son of the complex and enigmatic architect Louis Kahn, who in 1974 died bankrupt in a men's room in Pennsylvania Station (ironically one of the world's least inspired buildings) and was considered by many scholars to be one of the most important architects of the 20th century. Nathaniel sets out to sort out man and myth and eventually to reconcile a past with a father who led many lives. Merely a fleeting presence in his son's life and dead at the age of 73 (when his son was only 11), Kahn's obituary in The New York Times listed only his wife Esther and daughter Sue Ann as survivors. But the architect had two other children, both by women with whom he worked. (All three families actually lived within a few miles of one another, but never met until the architect's funeral.) Included throughout are interviews with Nathaniel's colorful extended family. His odyssey takes him to his father's buildings of ordinary brick and concrete that capture the grandeur of ancient structures. At the fortress-like turrets of the Capitol Complex in Bangladesh, a young boy stands alone before its spiritual power, with its massive structure reflected in the placid water surrounding the building like a moat. In that bittersweet moment, one can viscerally feel the emotional longing of Nathaniel, awed by a father who created such majestic beauty and yet who was unable to give of himself to his own son. Tom Titone, Actor/Playwright
November 12, 2003

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