Reviews

Some French movie entrepreneur must have come up with the idea: what if we make a trilogy, named the movies after the colours of the flag, find an exotic, arty director and use some famous stars? Tills will be ringing but the critics will be happy, too. Unfortunately there wasn't any idea after the initial concept. I could only take half an hour of this pap; the film was lurching from one ponderous situations to an other, with no reliance whatsoever on some old-fashioned ideas such as structure, meaning, progression etc. You've been warned...

First of all: Is Fiennes sufficiently good looking to play Hungarians? This is his second role to play a Hungarian :-) Anyway, back to the movie. It was a mixed bag. All the love affairs were contrived or downright silly. I'm almost sure that Szabo had a bit of a "help" with the script to please American audiences who are happily lapping up the current batch of Euro-fluff ( 3 Colors White and similar ) and this movie very much fitted that mould. Some scenes, like the torture were just downright embarrassing. Looks like art, smells like art but it's just soap-opera on the big screen. Historically I suppose it was fairly accurate. Just a note to the "anti-Zionist" persecution and show-trials in the early 50s: it was not anti-Semitic in nature as the instigator of these trials, the "Hungarian Stalin", was himself a Jew . All in all, it was a fairly mediocre saga and Szabo can do better.

This overhyped rubbish was definitely the worst tripe I had the misfortune to see in the last 5-10 years. Shallow, pretentious, tedious; was this an insult to others with an IQ in excess of 50, too? The characters are cringeworthy ( remember the ex-army guy turning homo-amorous ? ), the writing is moronic beyond endurance. When junk like this successfully pretends to be arty and profound, the values are irrevocably corrupted.

I saw this movie on SBS ( God bless them ) last night. It's vintage Greenaway, multi-layered, thought-provoking and mind-( and eye- and ear- )boggling. The opera is great, too, both the music and the singing, especially Esmeralda. The male lead was a bit weak compared to the two females. All in all, it's 10 stars from me, I was glued to the TV.