Resistance

The romance of melancholy is the best way I can describe the tone.

This dreary film would of been fine if I was looking to feel contemplative on the idea of existence as a whole showing how meaningful it is through single life and the glorification of the mundane interaction that such a singular life must undertake. But I was not looking for that. I felt mislead by the description, it would be perfectly fine and enjoyable if this was what I wanted.

That being said the discussion of the humans condition being consistence (and repetitive) regardless of cultural differences is some what over done these days. It is a notion that needs to evolve in its functional use for story telling. Hopefully where it is not longer the core of a story but an assumed trait perhaps. This is only a personal preference though and I acknowledge that not everyone thinks it is an trope that has become unreasonably popular.

what this movie was trying to portray or to interpreted is completely beyond me to comprehend. the screenplay was one of the worst ones i've ever experienced, so hollow, so dreary, so pretentious and so nothing. what's the poetic beauty in it, like one reviewer claimed? a movie is not a abstract painting that you could have different interpretation you saw differently from the others.

the sound effect is extremely bad. why? those thundering noises we usually heard only in the sci-fi movies when the alien spaceships attacking the earth but they constantly appeared in this film, making me think those noises might have come from the German bombers invaded the airspace before dropping big bombs. there were several females in this dreary scenario, some local males showed up or disappeared. some battle-hardened German soldiers who fell for the two local young women...but wtf?! this film tried all the ingredients to be nostalgic, poetic, romantic, harsh, cold, cold blood, goodwill....everything that you could think about, but in the end only a BIG NADA. i've tried so hard to get a grip of this movie's deep meaning, tried to understand why it should be made, to tell about....WHAT? then, it suddenly turned into an abstract messy crap.

Even in the most English parts of Wales you can't understand them for their welsh lint and singalong voices. Also, the story was lacking any bite. And the plot holes are too many.

A fairly interesting premise, and a story that might have been far more interesting if I didn't find myself having to switch on my superpower sense of hearing to make sense of the irritating mumbling between the characters.

Of course, no sooner had I upped the volume the music started playing - an eardrum-throbbing violin.

The net result was that I found myself spending more time playing with the volume buttons on the remote control than I did watching the film - a shame as it was on the whole pretty atmospheric.

I couldn't see the point of the Michael Sheen character, but the German Hauptmann was quietly convincing - if perhaps a little too quiet when he was not speaking German.

A really disappointing film. Adding 40/50 minutes of people staring in silence at someone or at something doesn't make a film poetic, gentle and sensitive, it's just a trick to water down the screenplay and save a lot of money for a low-budget film. The screenplay, by the way, is quite ordinary and unconvincing. In fact the action and the dialogues are so rare here, that almost all of them, the essential ones at least, are in the trailer. It's even funny to think that the film is practically the trailer plus silence and some beautiful views of the welsh mountains. This could be easily a 10-15 minutes short film without losing anything of the plot.