Rialto

Good performances and solid drama makes this movie an interesting and sometimes hard to watch movie. It makes you feel for its characters, their poor situations and its conclusion makes you wonder what would happen next. A good watch.

Rialto (2019) -

I'm glad that I could use the subtitles for this one. There's a lot of quiet whispered talk in a very strong accent.

It's not a cheerful film at all with Colm dealing with the death of an abusive father and Jay still dealing with his own Dad and being a parent himself.

I didn't realise that so many people had Daddy Issues like mine actually.

There's also a lot of aggression between everyone in general.

Although it's got a quite dull, grimey and sordid element to it, there is also something very sweet, but also erotic about the connection between the leads. It's not just the sexual scenes, which aren't actually that explicit, but also the timid and saddening relationship between Colm and Jay, as they open up to each other. It's that moment of intimacy as your getting to know someone while the urges continue to build.

It's filmed in a similar way to 'Vera' (2011-), so alike that I kept expecting her to turn up and accuse Colm of murdering someone. I think that would have just made his day. It would have improved the film too as the story doesn't really go anywhere and there's not enough of anything else to make it worthwhile really. As such there's not really a lot of point to it for me.

The acting is all very fine and all that, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in particular, but it could have been used for something a lot more worthwhile and to tell an LGBTQ+ story that doesn't seem so seedy and wrong.

I'm probably a bit too sentimental, but I would have liked the two leads to have found a kindred spirit in each other and run off together. What actually happens is incredibly boring and the build up that actually had some potential comes to a crashing halt and before you know it the film is over.

309.88/1000.

I thought this would be an interesting look at how 2 worlds collide and would have something fun to take away. WRONG. It was extremely slow and boring. I get what the other reviewers said about each man escaping from the pressures of being a man, but seriously? There are no happy moments at all in this film and an ending that leaves you wondering why on earth you just wasted the time to watch this. I was really wanting .... something out of this, but ... you just leave with nothing. Sadly, this was a waste of time, imo.

I enjoyed this film very much. "Rialto" is a powerful, impeccably directed drama about a middle-aged married man who becomes infatuated with a street hustler and continues to pursue him while his life falls apart. He's also grieving the recent loss of his father and lives with a family he's become increasingly estranged from. The performances in the film are all excellent, notably Tom Vaughan-Lawlor who is in almost every scene of the film.

"Rialto" reminded me a lot of the "angry young man" dramas the UK produced so well in the 60's. There's a slow, almost melancholy mood to the film, but it's never boring. The ending took me by surprise, but at the same time it felt strangely liberating.

This is another example of how the European film industry remains light years ahead of the U.S. Hollywood just isn't bold or brave enough to produce works like this. The film is bleak, but it never stops being intriguing.

This is a modern tragedy that reminded me of Buchner's ' Wozzeck ' and Thomas Mann's ' Death in Venice '. A 46 year old man is at the end of his tether, and all around him are strangers in his family who do not know him, and strangers outside of him who deprive him of the only job he has ever had. He loves only an inaccessible youth and like Aschenbach in ' Death in Venice ' he sees him as the embodiment of beauty, when the youth is all too pathetically human. The film is anything but rough in its direction, and the acting is superb. It is not an easy film to watch, but then the finest works of art are ( and should be ) challenging and difficult. The music underlines this and rarely has music been so well used. There is a scene in mud fields that moved me a lot and the music in that scene was excellent and added to the ' Wozzeck ' feel I had throughout the film. It had echoes of Alban Berg who put the Buchner play to music and made it one of the greatest and hardest Opera's to watch and bear. But like all works that work at the highest level ' Rialto ' left me with a gift, and that is the gift of further understanding mankind, and the complexities of being human, plus the extremities of abuse that are inflicted constantly on us as human beings. Rialto was that part of Venice where Aschenbach stayed in ' Death in Venice '. A painful but necessary gem that validates the art of film supremely.