Perfect Strangers

Saw Perfect Strangers at the Vancouver Film Fest, September 30, 2003. Well made, and thouroughly engaging movie that suprises at many turns. The simple story of a working class woman who goes home from a bar with an interesting stranger becomes first a story of kidnapping but then moves to a more complex story of love, obsession, and fear.

As with many foreign films, Pefect Strangers is not afraid to mix fantasy with reality. And, it helps to have excellent direction, music, and above all acting by the two leads.

I recommend this film if you get a chance to see it, or eventually rent it.

I was reminded slightly of a current Australian release, 'Japanese story" which is also largely a two-hander, and has lots of time spent in remote locations. And it too has a fairly major plot twist along the way. But comparisons run out there. Rachael Blake is just as fine an actress as Toni Collette, but what she has to do here seems quite ludicrous. I get concerned when people begin to talk to whitegoods, for instance. You might find that at one point you think, where can this film go from here? And I don't think that question is resolved at all. The second half of the film in particular gets more and more bizarre and kooky, and even at the end I think many people would say "huh?'. Sam Neill was OK too, but I can't for the life of me think what possessed him to do this film. As a student film it would be acceptable, but not as a general release.

It starts like a conventional girl-goes-home-with-the-wrong-man-horror. After a while it is almost relation comedy and psycho drama and relation comedy again.

You miss the traditional agenda here. This is perhaps a form experiment, mixing genres. But the mix is not done in a clever way. You expect something to happen, a real climax, but it never comes and you are slowly getting uninterested.

This kind of genre mixing can be exciting, but the actors here are not capable of fulfilling the director's intentions. A failure and not a very good one.

Yeah. Great movie. All about how ugly life is if you don't ever question anything. two nitwits act out the different imperatives of their egos and we have murder and tedium. This movie gets made because Canada, New Zealand and to some extent, Australia, have some kind of post-colonial guilt going on and this has backfired into 'all women directors must get their movies published' However, Hollywood only publishes crap by men so I guess its all even.

This movie Isn't uplifiting, Isn't kind, Isn't beautiful, Isn't clever, Isn't witty.

It has few redeeming qualities except for the wild landscape. Hey! take out the people and the story and this is one HELL of a nature documentary.

If you see this movie and think that it 'shows life as it really is', you need to get out more. And to the person who said it describes the 'dating scene' out there, I say: bollocks.

Oh and the acting wasn't great either.

A previous previewer said that this was in his/her opinion "like a small student movie", like that would be something bad(?). Anyway, there is nothing amateurish or "student" in this movie. Maybe the guy was talking about the simplicity and small-scaleness of the film. Yes, it is that. But simplicity is/can be very brave and rare today. Many times filmmakers try to hide their lack of ideas under a chaos of different ideas and technical complexity.

This was not the greatest masterpiece of all time, but it was well worth watching. The script was very clever, and the directing and the "flow" of the movie was very well made. Sam Neill and the lead actress were very good castings for these roles. I think it's refreshing to see movies that don't try to be anything else than what they are. I rate this movie not compared to any other movies I've seen, but as an independent being and work.