BEFORE: Another indirect link tonight, two actors from "Circle of Friends" link to Stuart Townsend from "Head in the Clouds" - Sean McGinley and Geraldine O'Rawe both co-starred with him in a film called "Resurrection Man". That's the best I can do tonight, and it helps me get back to direct linking starting tomorrow. Other indirect linkings are possible, but I only need one to keep the chain going.
THE PLOT: A sweeping romantic drama set in 1930's England, Paris, and Spain. Gilda Bessé shares her Paris apartment with an Irish schoolteacher, Guy Malyon, and Mia, a refugee from Spain. As the world drifts toward war, Gilda defiantly pursues her hedonistic lifestyle and her burgeoning career as a photographer.
AFTER: There are two main reasons to watch this period piece, as I see it. One is Charlize Theron playing a sexually free liberated woman, and the other is Penelope Cruz playing a model/burlesque performer. If that doesn't float your boat, then you and I clearly have different ideas about what makes movies interesting.
Seriously, though, this film set out to capture the interests of both sexes - for the women there's the romance plot, set against the historical backdrop of the early days of World War II, and for the men (or women who dig women, obviously) there are lots of scenes of dressing, undressing, bathing and other activities which, umm, naturally follow such things. You know what I mean.
I can believe a young man, just out of college, falling for a rich, liberated woman who turns him on to the free-wheeling lifestyle, and also turns him on in general, and being confused at times by her attitude toward relationships, which seems decades ahead of its time.
What I can't believe is a young man finding himself in a relationship with not one but TWO attractive women, who are into him but also seem quite into each other, boggling the mind with mathematical love-making possibilities, and having that man say, "Well, enough of this, I need to go fight in the Spanish Civil War, even though I'm not Spanish." I mean, props for wanting to go defeat Fascism, but he must be daft out of his mind. And to his credit, the three of them live together in Paris for, what, a year?
What happened after a year? Did the personalities of one woman or the other drive him nuts? Did he have too much sex, forcing him to go fight a war just so he could get a good night's sleep once in a while? Was it too much of a good thing? Or was his desire to fight the good fight really so strong? Either way, I'm just not buying it.
Maybe I'm biased - I never had to go fight a war, thank God, and the draft was never implemented during my lifetime. I remember when Gulf War 1 + 2 came around thanking my lucky stars that I was a bit too old to be drafted - not that the U.S. Armed Services would want me anyway. (Let's hear it for being out of shape and uncoordinated!)
But I also remember getting out of college and considering my options - I could have moved out to California, I suppose, or back to Boston, but that would have felt like a step backwards. But I was getting laid regularly for the first time in my life, and that surely affected my decision to stay in New York. Even though I denied that was the case, it was. Guilty as charged.
So far this February, happy endings are outweighing depressing ones, 8 to 3. I'm counting enduring love vs. non-enduring love - I think "About a Boy" might have been a wash.
Also starring Charlize Theron (last seen in "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion"), Penelope Cruz (last seen in "To Rome With Love"), Thomas Kretschmann (last seen in "Captain America: The Winter Soldier"), Gabriel Hogan, Steven Berkoff.
RATING: 4 out of 10 art galleries
No comments:
Post a Comment