Liebestanz unter den Ulmen

Maybe the fin de siecle atmosphere is the main virtue of this italian film about relations, first love and mature love, family and dreams, teenagers and impossible love , tensions and a monkey.

I was seduced by it for the nostalgic air , for nice acting and for the impressive death of Hella.

For furniture and music, for the dialogue and for few profound provocative - to unrealistic scenes - . And for the speech about flies, off course.

In my case, a film working like a sort of refuge. The basic virtue, fair portrait of subtle forms of innocence. And, sure, the exploration of aspects of a vacantion.

Some wag might describe this movie as an incestuous, turn-of-the-century version of "The Brady Bunch", or as "Oliver finally gets some", but far be it from me to say something like that. An adolescent boy (Mark Lester) and girl (Monica Guerritori)meet at a rural, turn-of-the-century Austrian resort where they are vacationing with their respective liberal-minded, single parents (Claudio Casanelli and Anne Heywood). Their budding love affair hits a serious snag when their two parents fall in love as well. This is an odd movie--even in Europe I think it's a little strange for two parents to watch their teenagers, naked and about to have sex, and remark on how "beautiful" they look. This is not really some sleazy sex flick though; it hews closer to Italian art than Italian sleaze, and the actual sexual content is actually pretty tame. Also, the "upstairs" love affairs are interspersed with a lot of "downstairs" drama involving the family that manages the resort, which includes a semi-retarded son who's obsessed with the Guerritori character, and a daughter whose ongoing feud with a guest's pet monkey(?) leads her to pretend to sleepwalk and eventually run away from home.

Contrary to the previous reviewer, I would say the unusual cast IS this movie's main strength, at least much more than the bizarre and random plot. Like many an adorable moppet, child actor Mark "Oliver" Lester grew up into kind of creepy adolescent. He's kind of an odd leading man, and it doesn't help that his character is given to reciting weird poems about dying flies. Anne Heywood, like Lester, started out in arty British fare like "Black Narcissus", but ended up pretty much plumbing the depths of Italian exploitation flicks (if you think this is sleazy movie, check out Heywood in "Ring of Darknes" or Lester in "What the Peeper Saw" sometime). Monica Guerritori was kind of a younger version of Laura Antonelli (with whom she later appeared in "The Venetian Lady"). Like Antonelli, she usually appeared butt-naked in only the classiest Italian art films. The most underrated actor here though is Claudio Cassanelli, who starred in a lot of Sergio Martino high-end exploitation flicks and died tragically in a helicopter crash.

I wouldn't recommend this movie to everybody, but if you're aware of its existence, I imagine you might like it.

It has been a while since I've seen this one, so I can't remember names in the movie. This Mark Lester flick deals with the subject of love, sex, the relationship between tham, and how to deal with it, if you are a parent.

Lester's father is a well acomplished shrink, and has brought up Mark to freeminded and un shackled by the morality of the time. They go on vacation to some remote place (Movie takes place probably in the early 1800's) where he meets a woman who shares the same ideology with her child as he does. They fall in love at the same time that Lester and the girl begin to fall in love. They begin to confuse sex with love, since they are both attracted to each other and are bent on doing it, however the moment is always spoiled by analitical and intellectual conversations on how they will go about doing it. They begin to hate each other, but this draws them closer, and in the end, out of a heated argument get lost in passion.

Not very well acted, but the movie does intullectually explorer the issue of love and sex. It also can show the confusion between feelings when no walls or barriers are are in place to guide us through our moral walk on this planet.

Great movie to see. Good luck trying to find it though!