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I saw this at SIFF (Seattle International Film Festival) and it was brilliant. I saw it later on TV and it was awful. WHY? Why would they take a fabulous show and take away everything that made it memorable? I just don't understand! The version I loved started with a voice-over (JB) describing it as a fairy tale about a giant (opening shot of Beatty's feet dwarfing skyscrapers as he treads through a miniature city, pulling back to establish perspective), a wicked queen (the nasty office gossip), and a princess (the lovely Belinda Bauer, not living in the real world at all). This metaphor was maintained throughout, and it worked! When he makes the decision to become two people, his own bland persona ("We met on my Junior Year Abroad and got married because people thought we looked good together.") and a wicked, dangerous, *attractive* alter ego with a scar and a limp, the change in the reactions he elicits are amazing.

Watching the scam take shape, I wasn't sure until it was over just how he was going to pull it off, but he did, and I was more than willing to believe that they lived happily ever after. The fairy tale metaphor holds the film together.

The version I saw on TV was unrecognizable. They'd completely eliminated the fairy tale frame, making it an implausible scam without sufficient skeletal structure to allow it to stand upright.

The film festival edit was one of the most fun films I've ever seen. The TV edit was ghastly. Why did Richert let them do it????? At the Q&A session at SIFF, he was talking about the difficulties making this film and "Winter Kills", and I suggested he walk with a limp. Who knows...it might have helped. It worked for Jeff Bridges!

Bruno Ganz is astonishing as a man recovering from traumatic brain injury. His performance is more realistic than most cinematic depictions of brain injury (aside from the idea that brain surgery could have been performed without shaving his head!), which is in itself remarkable; the many ways in which there is a knife in his head, literally and figuratively and symbolically, add layers to an already brilliant performance.

Angela Winkler also shines in her complex and troubled relationship to the injured man.

It's been years since I saw this film, and yet it stays with me. I really want to see it again. I have to say I think it's a real shame that it was not more widely seen initially, and that it never seems to make it back to the revival houses...

I feel very lucky to have seen this film on one of the few times it was ever shown in Seattle! It carries brilliantly the feeling of mystery and magic, of mystical revelations just beyond the horizon, of perfect happiness just out of reach... I was inspired by the film to seek out the novel, and then a biography of the author, and was not at all surprised to learn that this was the book whose spirit John Fowles was attempting to emulate when he wrote _The Magus_. It is a beautiful depiction of that which one doesn't quite comprehend, the adolescent world of Truth, Beauty, Honor and Love, the sense of immortality imbued with capital-letter qualities and the glory of discovery.

Anyone who has the opportunity to see this remarkable film should do so, and the novel is well worth reading as well.