duqupb Reviews

The Last Kiss (2006)

Remake of Italian movie (but better)

[7/10 · 23 November 2006]

This movie is the remake of an homonymous Italian film from 2001 titled "L'ultimo bacio" (The Last Kiss). The script, the acting and the production as a whole have however a considerably higher standard.

Dialogue, which was atrocious in the Italian version, is now bearable. Situations are lively, realistic and engaging, while in the original movie they were little more than melodramatic or farcical scenes.

Most characters are lifelike and plausible, while in the Italian movie they were just predictable, grotesque caricatures lacking all subtlety. In short, ironic vs. heavy-handed.

In this remake actors actually act (pretty well), instead of simply yelling and screaming throughout the whole movie. The acting is successful at conveying credible feelings of love, betrayal, anger and regret. Especially love is genuine and palpable, while the original movie comes across as rather cynical and disillusioned.

In fact, it is not clear whether the Italian version primarily aims at being an entertaining romantic comedy or a serious piece of social criticism. This Hollywood remake clearly opts for the former, which gives it rhythm, unity and coherence.

Another merit of this new version is that it offers a more equal and modern take on marriage and steady relationships, as opposed to the Italian strictly male chauvinistic dynamics. The male lead shows a greater depth and variety of feelings that goes beyond "feeling trapped" and "trying to escape." He appears to be truly sensitive, which makes it possible for the audience to ultimately sympathize with him as well.

Even the movie's Casanova is better cast as a physically attractive bartender, instead of a shady Italo-Rastafarian. The only problem is that it is quite difficult to understand why such a finely chiseled, outgoing male model would even dream of taking off aboard an old RV on a humanitarian trip to Africa: It is completely off-character. In comparison, the motives of the Italian Rasta hippie were a bit more plausible. It is just not very reasonable to create a character who is both a hippie and a Casanova.

The main flaw of this remake is in fact that all secondary characters are not at all well-developed, while in the original movie they had almost the same weight as the protagonist. It is for instance difficult to understand the young father who leaves wife and child because he feels inadequate and unappreciated, or to feel for the persistent lover who has a very hard time accepting having been dumped by his high-school sweetheart. The hippie-Casanova character is reduced to a mere excuse to add a few spicy sex scenes here and there. Even the trip itself is never truly explained.

The original Italian version seems to have "given up", whilst this American remake ends on a hopeful and heart-warming note.

Proof (2005)

Proof or mysticism?

[7/10 · 23 November 2006]

I liked this movie very much, but I find the way in which Hollywood usually portrays mathematicians to be rather embarrassing, clumsy and unrealistic. Such characters are often approached with some sort of reverential fear and cautiousness, as if mathematicians were spiritual or religious mystics: what a paradox!

Hopkins' character is unfortunately no exception.

Gyllenhaal's cocky character, on the other hand, is curiously overconfident, impulsive and outgoing for a typical Maths grad.

Paltrow's fascinating and truly likable character is the one of a young girl who is both strengthened and stifled by her father's overbearing intellectual personality and her close relationship with him.

Their strong bond has given her the skills to assert herself individually and intellectually, but she is still considerably hesitant and insecure in the social and interpersonal sphere.

Her frustrated, scheming and calculating sister tries to take advantage of Paltrow's intense grief and of her shyness and insecurity in order to kick her out of her father's house to sell it for her sole profit.

Vanity Fair (2004)

A romantic adventuress who tries to be cynical

[8/10 · 5 December 2005]

Highlights:

1) The beautiful photography that, with its dark, rich shadows and intense, brilliant colors, exalts the luscious yet subdued glory of the English countryside and the grand and almost vulgar fasts of British and continental aristocracy – and of Baden-Baden's casinos. On the other hand, the movie suitably portrays urban slums and the poor country world in drab, gloomy and earthy hues.

2) The contrast between the gentle likability of Becky Sharp, as interpreted by Reese Witherspoon, and the dark and harsh satirical tone of some scenes. This contrast is quite paradoxical and ironic since, in theory, such characterization should be the other way around: Becky shown as a pragmatic social climber and high society as her victim! 3) The tragically human way in which Becky tries throughout the whole movie to be a heartless and cynically rapacious social "mountaineer", but instead ends up following her heart and impulses all the way to social ruin and rebirth. In my opinion, this is an indication of the fact that the novel was written at the watershed between the 18th century and Romanticism.

4) The roughish charm of James Purefoy as Rawdon, the aristocratic army officer whom Becky marries for love (although she is convinced to have married him for interest) and whose devotion to gambling will, eventually, be a cause of her fall from high society.

5) India, India, India! One of the main characters of Vanity Fair is India, but not India as it is: rather, India in the imperial English imagination. Rich, decadent, adventurous, mysterious, sensual, scented, hallucinogenic, gilded, embroidered, dreamy India; the exotic land where nothing is what it should be and everything can be pretty much anything. It is no coincidence that Becky ends her life's journey on an elephant's back, by the side of an upward-moving merchant: For a romantic adventuress like her, there is no place in rigidly-structured, immobilized, class-conscious, aristocratic, early 19th century England and Europe. Only the wide world can handle her far-reaching dreams and aspirations, and only a modern and ambitious man of the world (albeit not a highly refined one) can truly love and appreciate her nature and charms until the last frontier of the Empire.

Flaws:

1) The melodrama: Witherspoon tries in vain to characterize the psychology of Becky Sharp a dramatic character, which is utterly immaterial. Becky is not supposed to be a complex dramatic character. Instead, she is just a "chemical reagent" whose function is that of bringing out and highlighting the prejudice, barriers, quirks and incongruities of 19th century English society. She is supposed to travel through society's tiers like Dante in the netherworld: upon meeting her, the characters react and, by reacting, they show who they really are. Thus, the sum of all reacting characters becomes an abrasively satirical portrait of 19th century Britain. Therefore, it is useless and perhaps even wrong to try to represent Becky Sharp as an intense, modern, highly dramatic character: The final part of the movie would have benefited from a subtler and more constrained acting style. But, perhaps, this strong characterization is but an expedient for showing us that Becky is the last heroine of the 18th century, or, perhaps, an early Romantic one.

2) The fact that Lord Steyn pays off all of Becky's and Rawdon's debts and saves them from bankruptcy (even preventing their furniture from being repossessed and reintroducing them into society) is presented in an a ambiguous way: At first, the viewer is in fact led to believe in the (highly improbable) explanation that Steyn's generosity derives from his selfless an idealistic admiration for Becky's father as an artist and that she is not directly asked anything in return. Later on, we are finally revealed that this supposed generosity is in truth subordinated to the award of sexual favors to Steyn by Becky herself. It would have been better to show his true motives from the beginning.

3) Reese Witherspoon's British accent is acceptable, but there are occasional slips even a foreigner can detect.

La frontiera (1996)

A tormented borderland story.

[8/10 · 22 May 2001]

Based on the homonyms epic novel by Franco Vegliani's, Franco Giraldi's new film La frontiera (The Border) has attracted acting luminaries Giancarlo Giannini (Fassbinder's Lili Marlene and Coppola's segment in New York Stories) and Omero Antonutti (Rossellini's Italia anno uno, Saura's El Dorado and the Taviani brothers' Good Morning Babylon).

Playing, respectively, the Austro-Hungarian officer Von Zirkenitz and the wise old Simeone, Giannini and Antonutti are cast as the on-screen elders of the film's co-stars, Raoul Bova (La lupa) and Marco Leonardi (Italiani).

Bova plays Emidio Orlich, a young officer in the Austro-Hungarian army. Every day he has to fight in the name of a decaying empire to which he doesn't feel to belong anymore and for which he doesn't want to risk his life any longer. He goes through a deep existential and identity crisis and decides to desert his own ranks to join the Tsar's troops in the winter of 1916, with the intention to rejoin the Italian army. After being caught by his comrades-in-arms, he is prosecuted and executed.

Cutting to summer 1941, Leonardi is Franco Velich, a young and handsome Italian officer returning to his home island of Dalmatia, now occupied by Italian troops. From the old, disillusioned Simeone he hears the story of fellow-Dalmatian Emidio, whose adventures the audience re-lives through flashbacks. Back in the present, Franco is torn between his loyalty to the Italian army and the consciousness to be serving a nation that he doesn't any longer perceive as his motherland and that has invaded his native Dalmatia.

The film deals with the theme of the difficult condition -both psychological and physical- of those who were born an have grown up in a borderland and have to face the problem of their ethnicity.

Giraldi, who lives in Rome but was born in Slovenia with a Slav mother and an Italian father, identified strongly with his protagonists' identity crises. 'From time to time history imposes upon people a border, a single identity. This is always painful and sometimes tragic,' explains the director of 1979's La giacca verde and 1976's Un anno di scuola.