La Celestina

'La Celestina' is based on Fernando de Rojas 1499 novel but this translation on screen is truly dull. 'La Celestina' looks good. The costumes and sets look radiant. The score is pleasant to the ears until it gets too repetitive and intrusive. The screenplay is poor especially the awful dialogues. 'La Celestina' is more a soap opera than a movie. Perhaps the director was confused about whether he was making a movie or a 'telenovella'. The dialogue delivery is laughably bad. The soliloquys are most annoying. The acting is overtly theatrical. With actors like Jordi Molla and Penelope Cruz, one would have expected better. Maribel Verdu is the only one who turns in a decent performance. For a fairy tale, 'La Celestina' has a lot of sex which are tastefully shot. Anyway, the film doesn't otherwise live up to expectation. Yawn.

This movie is part of the spanish cultural heritage. That is the play is that it is based on.

Written by Fernando Rojas in the beginning of the renaissance it was meant as a warning for the youth in his days. That is why this movie feel so staged all the time. For Penelope Cruz it was the beginning of her career and it must have been a huge honor to have been selected for this role.

The movie follows the play fairly truly from beginning to the end. All characters specialy la Celestina were done well and they didn't look all to professional. Remember it was a play meant to be performed at local gatherings. If you go to Salamanca in Spain you can find the parco Calisto y Melibea as a rememberance. Only open at times noboddy knows.

If you like Penélope Cruz or Juan Diego Botto, don't ever watch this film. Possibly it is their worst interpretation. But La Celestina is more than these two players. All the supporting actors and actresses make a really good job, and it is always a pleasure to see Terele Pávez playing. The setting is good, the dresses are quite correct and the adaptation of this difficult book (novel or theater play or whatever the critics decide it will be) is, at least, acceptable.

Interesting movie to look at, but failed to make me really care about the characters. The dialogue and manner of speaking was rather artificial and overly-theatrical; as if it were trying to go for a Shakespeare-lite effect. The characters' actions sometimes seemed to be nonsensical and in service to the plot rather than being the way people in such a situation would really behave; they would often act against their own obvious best interests with little to gain. If there was any kind of theme here I'm not sure what it was: Greed is bad? Let love take a natural course, without resorting to supernatural means to advance it? And I'm not even sure that Celestina really did any "magic" to get the two lovers together; she was just more of a persuasive facilitator than potion-brewing sorceress. I myself didn't have any problem with the sex/nudity; there's nothing wrong with looking at beautiful bodies and people enjoying each other. In the DVD I saw, however, some of the full-frontal nudity was blurred out, and some--a scene of Mr. Botto arising out of a bathtub--was not, so I guess someone somewhere DID have a problem with it.

Nothing stands out as particularly bad in this movie. The problem is, nothing is especially good, either. The story kept me mildly interested, but the entertainment value was usually kept to a minimum. The ending surprised me a little, but it certainly wasn't enough to cancel out the overall mediocrity. A decent way to kill some time, but nothing more.