A Pin for the Butterfly

Even though A Pin for the Butterfly boasts a range of very respectable British character actors, as well as a fine plot and a densely layered atmosphere, astonishingly almost noone has seen it or heard about it.

Hugh Laurie, so often a hilarious comedian, plays an unusually serious role and pulls it off quite beautifully, and the film's concentration on the innocent viewpoint of the little girl in the face of war is original and monumentally touching. It is a movie that haunts you and leaves you brooding for a long time afterwards. A magic realism pervades "A Pin..." that allows the viewer to wallow in its charm and wistful romanticism. The reality of the war, when it suddenly invades our consciousness brutally, hits us with a more than usual forceful impact that is liable to leave us stunned and raises our emotive levels.

Please, if anyone ever comes across this movie (it is quite hard to track down), buy it or at least try to watch it. Films like this should not be neglected and thrown in the trash can. They are far too valuable and beautiful for that.

Pin for the Butterfly did a great job in showing the time of communism inside the Czech Republic. It does have some genuine shots of the beautiful city of Prague as well.

The movie captures a heart felt story of a young girl's pipe-dream of finding freedom and going to America with her Uncle.

The actors did an outstanding job showing the full range of emotions.

The ending is quite stirring and pulls at the heart strings!

I highly recommend this movie.

Florence Hoath was such a terrific young actress, it's a shame she quit the profession so early. Even in a screenplay as muddled and unfocused as this, her talent stands out by a mile. She easily holding her own against the likes of veterans such as Hugh Laurie and Joan Plowright, and there aren't many child stars you can say that of.

It's just such a shame the rest of the film doesn't match the same standard, being a rather staid parable about the dangers of radical socialism behind the Iron Curtain in the middle of last century. There are a lot of surreal scenes that make no sense, some bizarre choices in camera angles and a few miscellaneous characters that border on caricature.

It reminds one of a particularly long history lesson at school. Informative yes, but not something you'd usually like to spend your leisure time on. Not in my case, anyway. 5/10

Any telemovie with Joan Plowright should be brilliant, but having said that, in context of roles that suit. To stick a bunch of very English middle class actors into a movie about post WW2 early Socialist Prague, just does not gel. The acting, the mannerisms, the ways of speaking & living seem to have little in common with the essence of an Eastern European culture. Maybe others do not see that as an issue, but to me it prevents believability.

The final scenes give you a true sense of the insanity & terror of living in a repressive regime such as those of Eastern Europe in the Stalinist era.

Other than that, basically a very long movie with little to captivate.