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I actually remember enjoying my first viewing in a theatre. This time, at home on tape, I was intermittently bored and irritated.
--The actress playing Valerie, the matriarch, gives the most egregious mimicry of Meryl Streep possible. Facial and vocal mannerisms, movement, reactions, etc. A truly shameful display.
--I am not a prude, but having a heroine that espouses general amorality, shamelessly and openly sleeps with her brother, and condemns ALL politics places insurmountable hurdles for an audience to clear in search of empathy, not to mention sympathy.
--Fiennes, with a bit of tonsorial change, playing three generation's of men? C'mon. Was this a salary saving strategy? Ridiculous. He also is miscast as a strong-willed, overpowering man. He is far too...sensitive.
--And then having a different actress playing Valerie as she aged, what, thirty years? It didn't help that she bore scant physical resemblance to the previous incarnation.
--The disappearance and then reappearance hours later of characters, now played by different actors, did not assist the viewer's appreciation.
--William Hurt was terribly miscast. It would be hard to find a more WASPish actor to play a Jew. His screen persona is completely wrong for this part.
This film reminds me of Bertolluci's failed film, "1900," in seeking to cover too much ground in one film. No writer, nor set of human buttocks, can withstand the challenge.
Follow Ups:
It didn't fail with me, that's for sure. Yes, there are better films, perhaps more balanced, with better rythm, but something like that can be said of almost any film.The 1900 is like a ten foot person among perhaps 98% of all films ever made.
it is by Bertolluci: one expects more of a god of film. Second, the cast is beyond reproach.
That being said, I agree with your placement of it; similarly, a fine winemaker's worst effort is better than a mediocre one's best bottling.
No matter its considerable faults, I still find myself watching it every couple of years.
Now, as to your high opinion of "The Garden of the Finzi-Contini"....were it not for Dominique Sanda, it would be forgettable...altogether too self-consciously self-pitying.
I let it yours....
Have it on my shelve unopened.
I saw it one time, and I could agree as far as I remember with quite a few of your comment.
But ONE this I do want to straight out is the fact that this film gives an perfect picture of the life and doing of Jewish families in this three generations life time.
And that is a big achivment. The raison d´ętre of this flm. Even the only one but a very valid one.
it shows Italy moving from a feudal system of principalities, through Fascism/WW-2 to the Communism Red flag vs. Democracy that's hinted at in the final scene Through all these upheavals, the Patrone remain the Patrone, and the man in the street is left clutching the same old Brass ring
1900 took 6 years to film, with an inevitable toll on continuity, but it is multi-layered, and stands head and shoulders over most attempts at period drama
De Niro has never been more flakey, Donald Sutherland has never been more wicked than as the Black shirt
I think it's clever
Eric
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