I mentioned to a digi-friend the other day that I'd watched this film, and he said he had too, but that the twist was obvious. I get irrationally angry at people who think that that is an appropriate critique. It's a film. Of course it's obvious. What was he expecting? So I told him that if you want unexpected, your best bet is real life. And then I thought about what made me upset. I enjoyed watching the film. I actually looked up the plot on Wikipedia so I knew what to expect. I like films better when they're spoiled for me. And while I understand that lots of people are not that way at all, I wonder if, when we complain that we saw something coming, what we mean is that the film bored us so much that our minds skittered ahead to fill in the blanks. For filmmakers, the ramifications of that possibility are that their burden is to keep the viewer's mind engaged in the present: interested in what is on screen rather than trying to create suspense with emptiness....
This film was remarkably amusing. The acting was certainly adequate to the task of a light comedy, and the scenes had a sort of fluffy chemistry that kept me laughing. Although this 50's flick makes a good attempt at equality between newlyweds Chantal (Sandra Dee) and Eugene (Bobby Darin), I still felt the ending erred on the side of the female, balanced only by the portrayal of vamp Tina (Stefanie Powers). If the film had been more about individuals, I'm not sure I would have worried so much about the battle of the sexes, but as it stood, the male and female characters seemed to line up into teams - the mother helping her daughter, and the fathers helping their son, each gender keeping secrets and using strategies against the other. The coloring and camera style smacked strongly of the fifties, and I felt a little as if I'd stepped into some thick fantasy in chiffon and chintz, but that seems to be a characteristic of the age/genre. As a relative feminist in some are...
I'm afraid that Franco Zeffirelli isn't quite the "faithful custodian of the classics" the sleeve claimed. The liberties he took with the plot appalled me, not because they altered in any significant way the flow of the story, but because condensing the love story into a couple of hours merely cheapens the experience. Jane's tormented youth becomes a few moments of discomfort, and her helpless wandering transforms into a short carriage ride after which she faints for no apparent reason. I must say that the acting in the film is very fine. The spoken french rolled glibly from Charlotte Gainsbourg's tongue, and the passions evoked by the director in all the main characters fit the story very well. I have been used to seeing the housekeeper as a brusque and enigmatic arbiter, but she became a caring and somewhat lonely older woman in the honed talents of Joan Plowright. Only a brief camera moment saved her from accusations of coldness, though. This version o...
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