Gazza-3

I saw this movie at the London Film Festival, introduced by Boe the director and the beautiful Bonnevie, the lead actress. Boe is a graduate of the Danish film school and, as you might expect, the film is packed with movie references from Bergman to Hitchcock via Lynch. I hope the movie picks up a UK distributor as a second viewing is needed to understand the movie fully. On one viewing alone, this is an intelligent, intriguing and thought provoking movie with an excellent sense of time and place (Copenhagen, the present, even though no-one seems to have a mobile phone!), clever cinematography and editing and good performances. Boe creates a vision of Copenhagen as a labyrinthine, alien jungle where your front door may disappear and your friends have never seen you before.

Highly recommended

I saw this movie at its UK premiere at the London Film Festival, introduced by Benton, Hopkins and two other cast members.

How could you not want to see this movie? Hopkins, Kidman, Harris and Sinise, in an adaptation of a Roth novel directed by Benton. The book deals with huge themes and moral issues around racism, child abuse, denying one's heritage, loss and loneliness. Sounds great, doesn't it?

Unfortunately this movie is a mess. Let's start with the casting: Hopkins sleepwalks through the whole movie and is totally unbelievable; the iconography around Kidman (beauty, style, intelligence etc) is incompatible with the trailer trash character she plays. OK, we accept her as the courtesan in 'Moulin Rouge' but it took a false nose for us to see her as Virgina Woolf in 'The Hours'; Ed Harris as a trailer trash husband calling Hopkins 'the old guy' - come on.

The structure is all wrong. It starts with the car crash the flashes back to 1998. Yet the most interesting section of the film takes place in 1944, with Hopkins as a young man. When we finally flash forward to the car crash again, that's not the end of the movie. There's a 15 minute coda added, after the 2 main characters have died. Suddenly Sinise and Harris are the stars.

Finally, the gargantuan themes of the book are trivialised. The enormity of what Coleman does to his mother and family passes over our heads. Contrast this with the same scenario in Sirk's 'Imitation of Life'. In that movie, when Sarah Jane turns her back on Annie we share the mother's unbearable pain. Where is Coleman's inner conflict, do we really feel Kidman's character's guilt and pain? Can a 100 minute movie really tackle these themes in a meaningful way?

Why did Hopkins and Kidman make this film? Why is it so disappointing? Is it an unfilmable novel? Decide for yourselves.

Much has been made of Rohmer's use of digital technology to 'fill in' the background. At times it works well, the scene where Grace and her maid witness from afar the King's execution is particularly striking. At other times it gives the film a strangely amateurish look, resembling a home video. However, the major failing is that the sheer artificiality of the mise en scene creates an alienating effect in the viewer. We know that what we are watching is not real so how can we feel for the characters? To be frank, I did not care at all what happened to the Lady or the Duke.

The other major failing, I regret to say, is the performance of Lucy Russell in the leading role. She is in virtually every scene and the success or otherwise of the film rests on her performance. OK she is speaking a foreign language but she is incapable of expressing real emotion. Her emoting in the scene where she recounts to her friend Mme de Meyler (an excellent performance by the debutante Helena Dubiel) seeing the head on a pole caused some embarrassed laughter in the audience. Also, watch her hands when she is expressing emotion!

All in all a very disappointing film, particularly given the positive reviews on this site.