Portrait of Jennie (1948)
Directed by William Dieterle
In Depression-era New York, painter Eben Adams despairs at his lack of success. One cold winter evening in Central Park, he meets enigmatic, old-fashioned Jennie Appleton, who captures his fancy when she asks him to wait for her to grow up. Soon after, Eben sells a sketch of Jennie to kindly art dealer Miss Spinny and, as he meets the oddly mutable Jennie in fleeting moments, begins to realize they share a special destiny.
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What critics compared Portrait of Jennie to
But the true inspiration is those old-fashioned romantic fantasies from the 1940s, the kind that used to run on Channel 11 in the middle of the day, classics like “Portrait of Jennie” or “Stairway to Heaven.”
There are a few moments of quiet grace (Kong and Ann’s skate across a frozen pond — an homage to Portrait of Jennie?) that work very well.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with a romantic fantasy—try Mitchell Leisen’s Death Takes a Holiday (1934) or William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948)—but it’s probably not the wisest of moves to try to sell one to a teenage audience as a horror movie.
Based on Shinkai’s own novel of the same name and reframing his usual fixations through the lens of Japanese history, “Your Name” is an unclassifiable experience that starts like a hormonal riff on “Freaky Friday,” morphs into an apocalyptic version of “Portrait of Jennie,” and somehow manages to layer a gender-swapping 12th century tale over the ongoing trauma of 3/11 in the meantime.