Nearly unbearable chronicle of condescending, British, henpecking shrews in Italy. The point seems to be about watching people transpose their freakishly uptight values onto a different culture, but it's played so broadly that one "gets it" in the first scene and there seems to no point to the rest of it. These insufferable, condescending, moralizing, determined-to-be-miserable know-it-all martinet/harridans are incapable of realizing that the screeching incivility they deploy to uphold propriety is a much greater offence.
Judy Davis is a complete lunatic both in the role and in her performance choices. Why anyone would want to assay the "most evil, screwed-up, shrew ever depicted on film" escapes me. She rages like a dry drunk until a viewer would be overjoyed to see her pushed from a cliff, or kicked in the face by a horse. It's unfathomable why viewers have been asked to identify with these insufferable prigs or to consider their dilemma.
Judy Davis is a complete lunatic both in the role and in her performance choices. Why anyone would want to assay the "most evil, screwed-up, shrew ever depicted on film" escapes me. She rages like a dry drunk until a viewer would be overjoyed to see her pushed from a cliff, or kicked in the face by a horse. It's unfathomable why viewers have been asked to identify with these insufferable prigs or to consider their dilemma.