Igenlode Wordsmith

I had seen trailers, but never thought I would actually get to see this film, and it is every bit as good as the trailers made it appear. My sole complaint on that score would be that the trailer I saw accidentally gave away the ending, which reduced the shock and the impact somewhat... but that is scarcely the fauit of the film! (I was interested to see from the credits that it was apparently based on a play, which I hadn't realised but can picture with hindsight.)

Irina Pechernikova is delightful as the dainty, secretly rebellious great-grandmother who falls in love against her family's wishes, and Veniamin Smekhov at eighty plays an unexpected romantic role in stalwart support as her love-interest; they make a charming couple, and of course the younger generation can't understand that the appeal of a love-letter is that it can always be reread...

But there are serious subjects being dealt with too. The past is not necessarily a happy place, either for individuals or Russia as a whole, and the film doesn't shy away from that. There is a scene where we even end up feeling sorry for the ungainly, domineering Olga, who bulldozers through life with almost tangible hostility and cannot bear the idea of her mother 'betraying' her image of the family. (She is so resolutely unfeminine and so devoted to her father that it came as a shock to me at least to realise late in the film that she is Dasha's mother; the script only hints at the story that must lie behind that...

Overall this film is very appealing and beautifully shot, with outstanding performances both from the central characters and from those who drop in simply as comic relief; Leonid's son and daughter-in-law are a little one-dimensional perhaps, but Elsa's neighbours are a tour-de-force. And I must give full praise where it is due to the quality of the English subtitles, as well, where creative care had clearly been put into translating the meaning and implications of what was being said rather than merely the wording alone...

This production provides a more than worthy swansong for its stars, and having been delighted to locate it I am even more delighted to be able to say that I found myself glued to the screen, laughed, gasped and smiled tenderly, and all in all enjoyed it very much.

I stumbled across the Italian comedy film "Moschettieri del re" by accident (in its Russian dub) and actually enjoyed it a good deal; as a native English-speaker watching it in Russian(!) I was obviously missing out on any finer points in the script and wasn't in a position to judge the quality or delivery of the original Italian dialogue, but I thought it worked.

The humour isn't exactly subtle -- one ongoing theme is the smell of pigs that clings to d'Artagnan's clothing and person, for example -- but, crucially, it's not annoying. There is nothing worse than attempted laughs that grate horribly on the viewer, and the comedy here is by and large good-humoured and in keeping with the characters as established, e.g. The running gag about d'Artagnan's horses. And the balance of humour and actual emotion/adventure is right; this isn't pure spoof, and when Aramis loses his temper over the others' unkind 'experiments' on their superpowered mute sidekick and walks out, for example, the breach is painful and palpable.

Yes, they do have a superpowered mute side-kick... And sunglasses (for no reason other than to provide an eye-catching image for the promotional poster, I think), and gadgets (which they also don't use), all of which are given out in a deliberate Bond-homage scene. The side-kick, however, plays quite an important role, occupying more or less the position of Planchet in the various adaptations where the Musketeers have a single knockabout servant between them, and eventually acquires a name and -- in a tear-jerking scene that's treated pretty much as genuine angst apart from its inherent absurdity -- an honorary rank.

All the actors do well, taking their comic roles seriously. I think the reason why the film worked for me is that in many ways the aged-up characters are played quite straight; they bicker, they get into embarrassing scrapes (and out of them), and they are larger than life, but they aren't being deliberately debunked and they aren't portrayed as stupid... as opposed to occasionally wilfully obtuse! This is a comedy adventure and not a send-up, and it has touching moments in addition to the pure slapstick, plus some decently entertaining dialogue. There's a genuine sense of relationship between the characters, and overall it has been made with evident affection towards the original as well as an appreciation of its absurdities -- and, to be honest, I think any successful adaptation of "The Three Musketeers" pretty much *has* to be done with a side-helping of lively humour, or it just becomes a tedious string of fights and set-piece action sequences.

And I felt that the 'Wizard of Oz'-style ending (where all the characters are revealed to have their 'real-world' counterparts) does actually work quite well in terms of justifying the inconsistencies and zany aspects of the rest of the film. The fact that, for one thing, nobody ever gets round to telling the musketeers precisely what their 'mission' is, or deciphering the secret map. Milady's miraculous youth and transformation. The switch in tone when it comes to the fate of the Servant. And, arguably, the somewhat childish nature of much of the amusement...

This film doesn't really have a plot -- beyond the opening gambit of "The Musketeers reunite thirty years later" -- but there is a reason for that. Meanwhile it's a series of episodic adventures towards an unknown end, in the spirit of an ongoing serial or soap opera. It has a decent Athos, which is always a selling-point so far as I am concerned, even if he does have a face like Toby Jones :-p The characters are well-defined and remain consistent to the updated versions of themselves that have been established, and I particularly liked the direction in which the older Aramis was developed here. I didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did; I gather it picked up a few awards on its original release, and I can see why.

So far as I can gather this was based on a popular European novel the appeal of which revolved to a great extent around the various soft-porn illustrations in the numerous different editions; the costume of the nubile young ladies in the novel was said to consist of shoes and a turban, and nothing in between, which obviously offered plenty of licence (of the most artistic kind) in their depiction! Equally obviously this could not very well be translated onto the cinema screen, so the acres of female flesh on display are clad in what amounts to the scantiest of contemporary bathing costumes, and a large proportion of the film seems to be occupied by choreographed shots of the cast rushing around in a shouting, giggling, marching or otherwise hectically occupied crowd, in order best to show off their assembled charms. The effect is more reminiscent of a Mack Sennett 'bathing beauties' production than anything else, and once the sheer scale of the number of women involved wears off it turns out to be a lot less engaging than one might think.

I'm afraid the only character whose fate ended up by interesting me in the slightest turned out to be Taxis, the Prime Minister (played by Armand Bernard) -- and I think he was the one we were meant to hate! But he was also one of the few characters with any distinguishing features at all...

The women really are pretty much interchangeable. Confusingly, the King's daughter, Princess Aline, appeared to be pretty much exactly the same age as the Queen who was apparently supposed to be her mother -- and who, conveniently for the British censor, ended up being the one wife to whom the King was 'really' married by the end of the film!

On its original release in Britain the film had to be withdrawn from circulation after less than a week because of audience catcalls and clapping in response to the scenes on screen. (The unfortunate director was completely confounded as to why his 'harmless musical fantasy' should cause such unrest among uncultured English cinema-goers.) More recent critics have complained that it is impossibly misogynist. I'm afraid I just find it not offensive but incredibly boring.

It has no characters and no plot to speak of, the music is entirely unmemorable and the camera-work is nothing to write home about. And the prospect of watching a small fortune being dissipated on screen simply isn't enough to keep this from being a snooze-fest.

It's not *bad*. It just isn't good in any memorable way.