El retrato de Dorian Gray

At the Outfest screening in July 2007, the director told us "If you haven't read the book, this picture will make no sense. For those of you who have read the book, I sincerely apologize." He also said "This is a difficult film." We thought he meant difficult to make, but after seeing it we realize he meant difficult to watch. He said his intent was to remake "The Picture of Dorian Gray" with the gay undertone highlighted. For whatever reason, he chose to throw out conventional film narrative style and make an experimental film. The result is dream-like, confusing, and disjoint. It's a hard film to make sense of, even if one knows the story well. If you aren't already familiar with the story, you'll have no idea what is going on.

The film does succeed in making explicit the gay subtext of the story and previous adaptations, but don't expect a conventional film.

I saw this movie at a film festival in Cardiff and i have to say that i really enjoyed it. Duncan Roy has done an amazing job of updating the novel to present day while remaining true to Wildes story. David Gallagher is great as Dorian. He is suitably pretty and wide-eyed as the more innocent Dorian at the the beginning of the movie but is even better as the dangerous and crazed Dorian that he evolves in to towards the end. Chistian Camargo (from TV's Dexter) gives a stand-out performance as Henry Wotton. Probably one of the best Henry's i have ever seen. While some actors of the past have had trouble making Wildes lines flow naturally, Camargo delivers the lines with ease. Rebecca Wisocky as Henrys wife also steals the odd scene. And Noah Segan gave a heart-felt performance as a love-lorn Basil Hallward. The movie had a cool and edgy look. Everything from the clothes to the make-up to the sett pieces were a great mix of the very modern meeting the very classic. Giving the movie a sort of timeless feel. All together i had a great cinema experience watching this movie and i would recommend it to everyone.

I really liked it although it's not going to please the multiplex crowd. David Gallagher is stunningly good as Dorian in this updated version of Oscar Wilde's tale of decadence and debauchery. The authentic whiff of contemporary corruption and depravity of the New York art world is chilling. Perhaps some of the other reviewers aren't that familiar with Wilde's text but I think Duncan Roy has created something that has the authentic spirit of the 1890s.Wilde's witticisms and jibes at morality sit very well in a contemporary setting.

I was also in the same screening and the audience warmly applauded at the end.

This is a relatively low budget production but it looks like great. I loved the fact that the portrait is a video installation too.

I agree with the first poster. I was also in the audience last night and expected far better than what was shown. If the director hadn't said the film took place in 1990, one would have never known. (Besides, the art scene in Manhattan was over at that point, having peaked before the market crash in the late 80s). And to equate AIDS with getting old is an insult. The acting was uneven and some of the musical choices weren't inspiring. It was just plain dull! I think the applause was polite, out of respect for the director and actor in attendance, but I agree it was a mad dash for the exits..... Certainly not a movie for the multi-plex or the art houses, but one to go straight to DVD.

Wow what a spectacularly pretentious and boring film. The first act of it is nearly unwatchable and comes off like a bad Calvin Klein "Obsession" ad parody.

I give the film 2 stars instead of 1 because, with a couple notable exceptions, the acting is quite good for this type of movie. Also, I applaud the director for at least trying to be daring. But those are the only compliments I can find for this movie.

I thought that just about everything else in the film failed miserably. The direction was utterly incoherent with only those already very familiar with Oscar Wilde's original story able to piece things together at all in the first half of the film.

The film is unsettling, sometimes presumably intentionally so, because there is nearly constant background noise distracting from the dialog/narrative. Televisions or unseen radios blare out repetitive monologues or inexplicable buzzing sounds can be heard. This aspect could have been worsened by a poor choice of the theater I saw it in where they apparently chose to turn the volume way up so the often mumbled dialog could be heard. Whatever the cause, the background noise was extremely grating. At least the terrible sound mixing would occasionally have the unintended consequence of waking up the bored audience when an inappropriately loud sound would suddenly slap them upside the head. I can see the intention with a buzzing snooze alarm, but when someone setting a glass on a table gives the audience a jolt (and a headache), that is not a good thing.

One of the worst failures of the film itself is the mixing of Wilde's dialog with contemporary dialog. You can certainly take old dialog and modernize everything else about a story very successfully (see "Romeo + Juliet" for one example). And I'm sure there are other movies that mix old and new dialog in a contemporary setting with success. But here you can always tell which lines of dialog were lifted from Wilde because they sound like they came from a much more interesting story. Often times, embarrassingly enough, they are used in a way that suggests the director has misinterpreted their meaning or tried to give them much greater meaning than Wilde intended. This is not helped by jarring and pretentious screens that pop up showing some of the lines of dialog.

So many others have listed other big problems with the film (casual racism, over-reaching and offensive AIDS story) that I won't detail them.

Suffice to say this film is a mess and should be avoided.