To say that this movie is disjointed is an understatement. It seems to have been spliced together with many (one would hope) useful scenes left on the cutting room floor. The dialog is awkward, with Banderas' accented English and Connelly's fake version of the same.(The Stafania Sandrellis character seems wasted and it's interesting to compare her role here with "The Nymph" which was supposedly made or released in the same year (1996). She seems like two completely different persons (actors) in the two films. It's interesting to learn that she speaks English--unless her lines were dubbed.) There are references to the tyranny of the regime but we don't see exactly how that affected the lives of most people -- only bizarre situations that couldn't have been commonplace. The Connelly character talks about getting past the censors but it's not made clear how this worked. Was everything in Chile submitted to censors at the time? Talk about a big government bureaucracy! And the motivations of the characters are never really developed. What clue did we have that Connelly's cousin was really a good guy underneath his facist exterior? Was the Cardinal an appeaser or a crusader? And what's with the sex scene. Does Banderas have a clause in his contract that he gets to show his tush in every film? This looked like it was added after audiences said they wanted to see more heat--especially after the earlier teaser scene between Connelly's character and her cousin, where the camera conveniently cut off at critical angles and the scene itself ended abruptly with whatever was going to happen left up to the viewers imagination.
Review of Of Love and Shadows
