| Overall Grade: |
A |
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| Story: |
A |
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| Acting: |
A |
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| Direction: |
A |
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| Visuals: |
A |
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Great Movie
by Tones (movies profile)
Feb 20, 2007
3
of
4 people found this review helpful
In order to really appreciate this movie, I recommend seeing it on a Sunday afternoon with a friend over wine and cheese, and maybe caviar.
I like every aspect of this movie, one about the relationship of a man and woman. It's intensely romantic and even in tragedy is very beautifully captured. There's a dreamlike sense to this movie and yet a deeply emotional sense and the mixture of these two elements paired with the title makes you wonder about life at the end.
Daniel Day Lewis plays the perfect womanizing doctor with a kind heart but with an emotionally uncontrollable sexual appetite. Binoche plays the perfect Counterpart to Lewis' character: she is the idealist, sensitive, intense, artstic, and vulnerable lover to Lewis' character.
In light of this relationship, this movie is filmed mostly in Prague in the 1960s with a rebellious anti-Soviet population eventually controlled by the darkness of Communism.
Within this,Lewis' character and Pinoche's character bond. She with her photography, he with his rebellious feelings towards the Soviet Union.
The movie delves into the darkness of corruption and fascist invasions of people's privacy; yet it also delves into the sensitivity of how a man and woman coexist.
The movie also has other facets: Lewis' relationshop with Lena Olin, his informal mistress (sex buddy). Their relationship is an oddly sexual platonic relationship that brings a voyeuristic curiosity to the viewer.
Then there is Olin's insecurity with committment and the dual vulnerability between her and Lewis' wife Pinoche, who, aware of his promiscuity with her has a steamy nude photo shoot with her.
The complexity of emotions and it's revolution around the complexities of life and the very period in a country caught between periods and cultural traditions makes this movie chillingly powerful when, it ends in simplicity: a car wreck in the rain killing the main characters.
Yet the ending is not tragic, but rather beautifully portrayed with Lewis and Pinoche finally happy, dancing at a party with old friends. The ending of windshield wipers fading into a fog is tearfully beautiful. Perhaps one of the most beautiful portrayel's of death I've ever seen in cinema next to that one 50s war movie where a soldier is dying a the camera films the wounded soldier's curious hand trying to touch a butterfly when he is shot and the hand rests limp, motionless, still. |
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