4/10
It is not working at all, which is more mostly the concept, but also the execution
22 June 2017
Warning: Spoilers
Here we have Antigone and I will just call it like that because the incredibly long title this film has here on IMDb would give me a ton of words that IMDb spell check could not recognize and I could never send the review. Good thing you say, but I disagree! Anyway, the movie runs for slightly over 1.5 hours and was released back in 1992, which means it has its 25th anniversary now. It was made by married couple Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub back then and it is somewhat symbolic for their usual work. This Brecht-based movie looks like a theater play. There is a stage, there are actors, none of them famous or well-known, and several of them have hardly appeared in any other films, but probably in many other stage productions. I personally must say I am not familiar with the Antigone story and Material by Brecht, so I went into this film expecting nothing. Actually I did not expect too much as I did not like the other stuff by the filmmaking duo I have made so far and eventually this one here sadly turned out underwhelming too. Maybe it is a good watch if you love Brecht or the play or if you go to the stage theater on a regular basis because this is where the film would have been working, but not on the screen and that is a common problem I have with Huillet and Straub. The performances seem overly theatrical (in a negative way) and over-the -top from start to finish. It is an entirely subjective approach from me, but for me it was not working at all and it made me lose interest in the story pretty quickly. The sceneries were fairly nice, but this is also the only somewhat decent aspect from this "movie". I personally have to give a thumbs down here. Not recommended and from what I have seen I just cannot see H&S on par with the best other German-speaking filmmakers of the second half of the 20th century. Watch something else.
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