Planétarium

Tuned in because of Portman & Depp, but soon saw that there was no real depth to the story. History is always useful...

15 minutes into the movie I started to feel unsettled, then I brightened up a bit when I realised I was watching a masterpiece of bad cinema. The story was bizarre and incoherent, the direction was laughable (I did actually laugh at several points), and the editing was performed by a psychopath on speed.

Natalie Portman struggled bravely through, but Depp was out-acted by the houseplants. The only good decision the director made was giving her as little to do as possible.

This movie could rival 'The Room', achieving cult status because it is so bad. I can honestly say this was the worst movie I've seen in my 60 years on the planet. Even the titles were bad - they were in a font so tiny as to be unreadable. I'm guessing the actors bribed the title guy so that nobody would see their names. I've given it one star for wardrobe, and because I feel sorry for Portman.

Two American sisters, Laura and Kate Barlow (Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Deep) tour some theaters in Europe shortly before World War II with a spiritualism number, as one of them is a medium. When they are seen in Paris by André Korben, a film producer (Emmanuel Salinger), he becomes enthusiastic about them and proposes a project to them.

Plantarium is one of those films that contains interesting approaches (even intriguing and perverse) and several good ideas but that do not manage to integrate satisfactorily and that end up disintegrating, partly due to their nature, due to an ambiguity that is no longer effective and above all because of its cinematographic realization.

We know that a planetarium is a device that projects an illusory sky onto a vault. One of the themes of Rebecca Zlotowski's film is the crossroads between reality and fiction through cinematography (reminiscent of some stories by Horacio Quiroga on the subject) and a reality that in this case is ambiguous and that also seeks the help of parapsychology and the dream. As for the title in Spanish (Connection of love) it alludes to one of the perverse aspects of the plot (perhaps the most original) that remains halfway. And all this in a climate of the time that wants to be emerging but without achieving it at all.

Planetarium offers a very good performance by Emmnuel Salinger and as usual in these productions, a beautiful art design.

Definitely a poor film, there are several problems, first of all the film starts with numerous subplots that end with nothing done or are left to themselves without a real conclusion, the main plot is quite poor and if in the first few minutes I could have been intrigued by the quality then it drops a lot. The acting skills are average, Natalie Portman is very good, as always, moreover, even Lily-Rose Depp's interpretation convinced me even though I didn't particularly like the character, I was a little more perplexed by Emmanuel Salinger's interpretation that starts off quietly but that from the middle of the film and especially in the end improves. The thing that bothered me the most though are the dirty scenes that are randomly thrown in the middle of the film, and if you go from a simple nude scene of a few seconds, even if they make a thread of sense, you move on to real pornographic films that do not help in any way to expand and move the plot forward, let me be clear to me the dirty scenes do not particularly bother but they must make sense for the purposes of the plot, otherwise they are just embarrassing and negative. Too bad. Sorry for any errors in the translation.

I made it through this movie only to ask myself "why" at the end. The script is unfocused and never seems to develop a coherent theme. There are two psychic sisters who link up with a Jewish film maker. The anti semitism in this film is hohum. The psychic portion is a soporific. Arrow jewelry and bobby pins are sprinkled throughout the film for some reason. The cinematographer must be in love with Portman since the best parts of this movie are of Nat in many guises. Planetarium is in French. The actors speak clearly and the dialogue is slow. Maybe that's why I stuck with it. A good chance to practice my language skills. I can't recommend this film.