Spiritualist melodrama
Like another reviewer on this board, I can't help but go against the grain and describe this film as tosh: moody, well-shot tosh perhaps, but tosh nonetheless. It has a nice bit of piano music in it which keeps popping up time after time, and the usual distinguished performances we see from British actors in the 1940s, but that's about it.
WHILE I LIVE has an arresting opening sequence which climaxes in a woman dropping off a Cornish clifftop. Years later, folk in the ancestral home question whether a mysterious young woman who has mysteriously arrived at the property is in fact the reincarnation of the dead woman. Yes, it's one of those melodramas with a spiritual edge, made as a result of the massive loss of life in the Second World War (just as WW1 heralded another mini-boom in spiritualism).
Sadly, WHILE I LIVE doesn't offer much in the way of mystery or depth, and after a while all of the brooding and endless dreamy moments become more than a little tiresome. I'm the sort of person who looks for incident in a film, whatever its type, and there just isn't enough of it here.
WHILE I LIVE has an arresting opening sequence which climaxes in a woman dropping off a Cornish clifftop. Years later, folk in the ancestral home question whether a mysterious young woman who has mysteriously arrived at the property is in fact the reincarnation of the dead woman. Yes, it's one of those melodramas with a spiritual edge, made as a result of the massive loss of life in the Second World War (just as WW1 heralded another mini-boom in spiritualism).
Sadly, WHILE I LIVE doesn't offer much in the way of mystery or depth, and after a while all of the brooding and endless dreamy moments become more than a little tiresome. I'm the sort of person who looks for incident in a film, whatever its type, and there just isn't enough of it here.
- Leofwine_draca
- Apr 29, 2016