rwilson-7

...but I rate it as such because I saw this movie as it should be seen, in a suburban "art house" cinema in the Sacramento suburbs in 1969. An interesting audience; some older men wearing overcoats and a few "sophisticated" couples from the local colleges. And me. I was not exactly sophisticated myself at the time (being only 19), but I laughed out loud a lot, while the rest of the spare audience stared at their shoes. I enjoyed the audience even more than I enjoyed the movie. And I enjoyed the movie a lot.

P.S. Taylor Mead should be made a saint. I would like to see him made a saint not only because he deserves it but also because he might then cancel the insane 10 line rule here. There are movies that don't require 10 lines of commentary, this being one of them.

Amazing that this film is on DVD. I saw it in 1967 (in suburban Sacramento of all places) and have never seen a trace of it since.

It is a fairly terrible movie, but it does have its place in Bergman's movies. Swedish reviewers at this point in his career were among his severest critics, and this movie was his response. It should have been deft and ironic but, as I think we're all aware by now, Bergman is not exactly over-burdened with a sense of humor. I suppose he also thought color as something of a joke at that time, which might explain some of the very ugly effects.

I can't really recommend the movie but it does give some insight into Bergman, so I rank it a little higher than the other reviewers.

P.S. And I thank Anders, the foreign exchange student from Stockholm at my high school, for making me see this movie and who filled me in on the info about Bergman and the critics. He too thought it a lousy movie.

The folks complaining that this movie as thin as history and as thin as an art tour are missing mising the point. It is about catching the moment where history (time passing) and art (time captured) intersect. The director is using Russian history and the premier Russian art museum to make the same point that Proust spent nearly 3000 pages explaining in his masterpiece: that art is the art of capturing the passage of time. Once you understand this, you can also understand that filming the movie in one shot was not so much a stunt as a necessity. 300 years of history had to be captured in one moment (which, in this case, lasts for 90 minutes). Whatever its flaws, it is by far the best film version of Proust that has ever been made and is certainly the best Russian film since "Andrei Rublev" or "Sayat Nova."

P.S. I was at the Hermitage four months before the filming of the movie and can assure everyone that there was no faking of the one take. All the spaces the camera explored are just as they are shown, although some chairs were removed from the red room. (And, thanks to a Russian friend, I got into the museum for free.)