Forever Mine - Eine verhängnisvolle Liebe

I saw this film at the Telluride Film Festival. People were walking out, but I stuck it out. Wish I hadn't. Shlocky story, contrived and boring characters. The only thing mildly interesting was to see the revenge plot play out and that was a disapointment as well. Pass on this one.

I watched this film at the Torun camerimage festival in Poland.The whole audience was in stitches, which would have been fine except this was supposed to be a romance. How a renowned scriptwriter like Paul Schrader managed to come up with such bunkum is unfathomable! Watching it reminded me of the scene in Singing in the Rain, where the audience is in uproar at the unsynchronised sound. The whole experience was surreal! I promise you, you won't see a bigger turkey than this all year - Ed Wood would have been proud of it!

We all know that Paul Schrader is a sober son of the Dutch

Reformation Church. Still, I'd love to have a taste of the

crack he was smoking when he wrote this flaming lulu, a

painfully sincere and heartfelt tribute to undying love that

suggests Stanley Kubrick singing "Love Theme from Mahogany" a cappella.

Apparently an attempt to capture the spirit of Scott Spencer's novel "Endless Love" (so famously lost by Franco Zeffirelli), FOREVER MINE posits Joseph Fiennes

(he of the smoldering, gotta-have-you eyebrows) as a Miami cabana boy who messes with the wrong guy's wife--Gretchen Mol as the secretarial cutie who married

gnarly Mr. Big (Ray Liotta). Before you can say AGAINST

ALL ODDS, Mr. Big is coming down hard on Cabana Boy--only, in Schrader's world, this means more mutilations, burials alive, disguises, funny accents, and

villainous moustache-twirlings than in the entirety of

Shakespeare's CYMBELINE.

Schrader claimed he wanted to go back to the nineteenth

century. And indeed, the over-the-top melodrama suggests

a desperate attempt to flee fin-de-siecle irony. But it's

always a train wreck when cerebral directors try to let go of

their book-learning and Open Themselves to Feeling. FOREVER MINE suggests a cable-movie version of Robert Bresson's two wackadoody salutes to cute young boys, FOUR NIGHTS OF A DREAMER and THE DEVIL PROBABLY; Fiennes greets Mol in a seedy motel room on which he has spray painted the words, "GIVE ALL TO LOVE." (That was the tagline of the movie's abortive theatrical run.) Like Kubrick in EYES WIDE SHUT, Schrader

tries to peel off his layers of coldness and ratiocination--but

any movie that opens with a quote from Walter Pater suggests that the filmmaker is more suited to analyzing

melodrama than expressing it.

For all the tropical gloss put on it by the great cinematographer John Bailey, FOREVER MINE has a giggle-inducing quality that's unique even to bad Schrader

movies. (In one scene, Fiennes leaves an ambivalent Mol

in her hotel room. As he walks away, he bumps his head

into a palm frond, stops, and seems to look back at the

palm frond. Fade to black. Does Schrader equate Douglas

Sirk with Ed Wood?) Now that he's expressed his inner lovesick sap, maybe Schrader can go back to who he really

is--a cold, alienated, God-haunted, overeducated freak

from Michigan who's also the greatest living writer of

movies.

"Forever Mine" is a somewhat flawed telling of an interesting and unpredictable love triangle story which is built around a solid core cast of under-rated actors (Fiennes, Mol, and Liotta). The film, which takes place over 17 years during which a Florida cabana boy struggles with an evil politician for possession of his wife, begins as a romantic melodrama and turns into a darkly obsessive war of wills. "Forever Mine" suffers from low budget appurtenances (music, sets, props, etc); an uneven flow which runs in the beginning and crawls through the middle; and an unnecessary murder which serves little purpose; etc. Those who can overlook the ragged edges of the film will be rewarded by some excellent performances and an evocative and compelling drama while, as the extremes of IMDB.com's users' perspectives indicate, the more analytical viewers will react quite the opposite. An earnest and interesting love it or hate it sleeper.

I won't attempt to summarize the plot, such as it is. Suffice it to say that every single character in this film manages to behave in the least straightforward and believable manner in every situation. The heavy hand of a poor screenwriter is evident throughout, as all the characters seem more manipulated than motivated. The writer/director, Paul Schrader, was an unfamiliar directorial name to me until I watched this mess, and his resume makes it clear why. He's had a few successes as a writer, but pretty much all of them were directed by Martin Scorsese, who is very definitely not on hand to salvage this disaster.

Fiennes and Mol are game for the most part, and do what they can with the laughable dialogue. Ray Liotta, however, is at his over-the-top worst. He can be effective with the right part and some directorial restraint (see *Blow*, for instance) but neither is present here.

Avoid this and find something better to do.