El intruso (Enduring Love)

'Enduring Love' manages to be grip the viewers attention right from the very beginning. We are given some wonderful shots of the beautiful British landscape at the centre of which there is couple on a picnic. However a hot-air balloon appears to be on the loose and what follows is a terrible accident that effects their lives. 'Enduring Love' is visually impressive mostly due to the excellent cinematography and the background score contributing to the scenes. Penhall's writing is very good (sharp dialogues, unfolding events, well-defined characters) but in the middle it gets a bit slow-paced. The stalker subplot could have been done with less focus (that extra scene during the rolling credits wasn't necessary and the film may have been stronger without it) as it was working better as a movie about Joe and his fragile relationship with Claire. The movie is pretty much character driven and it heavily relies on the performances. Fortunately, this is where 'Enduring Love' scores high. Daniel Craig breathes into a role that seems made for him. He portrays Joe's guilt, confusion, patience and determination with amazing skill. Samantha Morton has less screen time but she is just as good while she gives a beautifully understated performance. Rhys Ifans springs a surprise in remarkably playing a homosexual stalker with Clerambault's syndrome. Bill Nighy and Susan Lynch are adequate in their tiny roles. For me 'Enduring Love' has been a strange movie watching experience but as I thought more about it, I grew to understand and appreciate it more. It does have its flaws as mentioned earlier but it's a good character study and visually interesting.

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

One day,novelist and science lecturer Joe (Daniel Craig) takes his girlfriend Claire (Samantha Morton) out for a picnic in the beautiful English countryside.He has an ulterior motive-he means to propose to her.But then,suddenly and completely without warning,their lives are changed irrevocably forever when a red hot air balloon falls from the sky and a desperate struggle ensues to save the people on board.A man is killed and Joe is plagued with feelings of guilt and failure for sometime after.After a while,he does his best to put the incident behind him and move on with his life.But there's one person for whom doing that obviously hasn't been so easy for-fellow rescuer Jed (Rhys Ifans) who begins obsessively following Joe everywhere,leading him down a nightmare path of fear and madness.

All of the cast do exceptionally well.Craig crafts a perfect portrayal of a retiring English gent desperately ill-at-ease with the troubling situation in front of him.This is the making of a promising new English talent we are seeing here,following on from his success in the lead role in Layer Cake.Ifans,usually a comedic actor (sometimes even in films where the tone is pretty serious),here successfully starts to broaden his range with an impressively unhinged portrayal of a man unable to let go and desperately trying to make sense of the demons burning inside him.Supporting players Morton and Bill Nighy are also very good back up to these two actors who are shining their socks off.

The film has an impressive use of the camera,with inventively flashy visuals here-and-there and still shots that skillfully add to the tension of the story.This is complimented with a clever use of soundtrack that further revs up the story some notches.

Sometimes the story doesn't come together that well,and the plotting goes a bit wavey.Also,some of the dialogue and delivery can't help but feel a little uninspiring.But for the most part,Brit director Roger Michell has crafted a film that hangs together very well and proves to be very intriguing,as well as further high-lighting some fine British talent that deserves to go much further.***

A couple are about to open their Champagne and have a picnic in the beautiful Oxfordshire countryside when an out of control hot air balloon descends into their field, and, in so doing it perhaps disrupts or radically alters their lives forever.

After an extremely well shot and directed opening the film then never managed to live up to the expectations created by such a prolific beginning. The story became the study of the insane adoration of one man for another, as well as philosophical questions with regards to the nature of love and how we can understand this huge but largely overlooked phenomenon.

The acting by Daniel Craig was again impeccable, he really portrayed his part well of the University lecturer who becomes obsessed with being obsessed by, and is surely headed for the big time if he wants it. Samantha Morton was brilliant as Craig's artist girlfriend, but less convincing was Rhys Ifans who I can never really take seriously which was a problem with the character he played here.

The film techniques were impressive, the music was a little dramatic but good, and the editing was very well done. I did not mind the detached and at times hand held camera-work, it gave it a realistic and authentic quality. This was a strange but refreshing film that had great acting, an OK story and more or less maintained my attention throughout.

(since antirealist already beat me to the first...)

Oddly, I happen to be the person who asked Michell why he chose to use a hand-held camera on Saturday, and his initial response ("Why not?") was a bit flippant, but at the same time, I'm guessing the filmmakers weren't intending to give anything other than glib answers to the puffball questions they were expecting. (When asked if they felt the film perpetuated the negative stereotype of the mentally ill being violent, director Michell dismissed the allegation out of hand before Rhys Ifans stepped in with a quick-hit one-liner about being "completely sane, but I'm feeling a bit violent about that question." That should do it for intelligent discourse at THIS Q&A, thank you...)

The camera-work is a bit distracting, not necessarily because it's hand-held but because the reason for it -- which Michell did say was to represent a first person POV -- is so obvious. In particular, there are a few scenes in which the camera sneaks around behind walls and windows to catch a better view of the characters that screams "you're being watched," which generally sums up my main concern about the film: it telegraphs almost everything.

For a psychological thriller, it isn't nearly as taut or unpredictable as it needs to be. It also lags notably between plot points, content to bleed off any steam it may have picked up from a previous scene. Part of this problem could be caused by the trailer's reliance on exposing nearly every twist in the film, and part of it could be on the film's overuse of "thriller music" that, in the cut I saw, nearly overpowered all five senses every time it appeared in the mix.

However, the acting is generally impressive, yet understated. Daniel Craig does a wonderful job at portraying the complexities of a rational man who comes unhinged in the aftermath of a bizarre accident and the resultant stalker he's burdened with. And there was at least one twist that made me jump, so all is not lost on the tension front.

Last thought: I was stunned by the film's equation of homosexuality, theology and mental illness. I'm not sure what exact conclusion it (or the book) is trying to come to, but I'm guessing the post-screening Q&A wasn't the place to bring it up...

ENDURING LOVE (2004) *** Daniel Craig, Rhys Ifans, Samantha Morton, Bill Nighy, Rosie Michell. (Dir: Roger Michell) 'Fatal Attraction' gets a sex change …and then some.

Fate and love seemed to be intertwined and can lead to lethal consequences, if not life changing and that simply is what happens when one idyllic day a British couple in love go picnicking in a bucolic field where tragedy inexplicably occurs.

The couple, Joe and Claire (Craig and Morton), are basking in their happiness when out of nowhere a red, hot air balloon enters the nearby horizon threatening to crash or worse yet continue its flight with its precious cargo: a young boy apparently unchaperoned with four other men frantically in pursuit of its wake. Joe, hesitating to make sense of the insensible, finally joins the posse whereby all five manage to wrestle the basket to earth until a fateful gust of wind intrudes sending them all aloft with deadly results.

Amongst the aftermath where all but one survives including a scruffy looking loner named Jed (Ifans) who asks Joe to join him in a mournful prayer for deceased. Reluctantly obliging the stranger who has shared a truly traumatic event sets the course of the film into a helter skelter portrayal of love gone wrong amidst an uncommon bond.

Joe, an academic, is suddenly plagued by the odd Jed on a regular basis showing up unannounced with a request to speak to him resulting in Jed's immediate crush on him sending him into a state of anger, confusion and wrestling with the other dilemma he has harbored: wishing he was able to do more to save the man who perished in the accident. Joe cannot get this out of his system that he should have conceivably prevented an unnecessary death while Jed cannot get Joe out of his system in delusionally believing they were meant to meet under dire circumstances underscoring the prevalent unspoken desire to be with one another.

Joe also is making life difficult with his relationship with Claire, an artist who is very deep into her work and cannot deal with Joe's obsession and subsequently Jed's for that matter. What follows is a tale of mixed emotions, homoerotic overtones, the fear of intimacy, the knowledge of failing to stop an unstoppable nightmare and ultimately the amount of psychological damage one can endure in the name of love.

Director Michell - who helmed the diverse 'NOTTING HILL' and 'CHANGING LANES' – practically melds the two, an English romance with an action thriller in his adaptation of the novel by Ian McEwan by Joe Penhall – mixes the taut tension expertly, particularly in the calm before the storm and then into the eye of the hurricane in the opening sequence which sets the aftermath in motion.

Craig – best known as Paul Newman's f**k-up gangster spawn in 'ROAD TO PERDITION' – echoes Richard Harris with his craggy, middle-class good looks and slight brawn as Joe, allowing the shades of grey to immerse himself as the film progresses largely from his point of view in utter disbelief at that madness unspooling and Morton counter balances with just enough attitude and frankly seems to be playing the male role in the couple (i.e. the strong, fairly silent-to-the-point tolerance of her mate).

It is Ifans, best known as Hugh Grant's grotty flat mate from the aforementioned 'HILL', who surprises in making his sad, mild-mannered loner into a uniquely frightening force to be reckoned with not seen since Glenn Close's downward spiral of carnal obsession in 'FATAL ATTRACTION' which feels like a carbon copy of but holds itself on not being only a suspense thriller but a uniformly smart, adult drama. With its Hitchcockian undercurrents the film as a whole gets under one's psyche skin and nestles itself into our worst nightmares: unbridled love by an unwanted would-be love.