Reviews

Unlike virtually everyone here, I did not like or admire this movie. I thought it was pretentious, unreal, stiff and awkward. Yes, Julie Christie was terrific with impossibly self-conscious material, but that didn't help much. The characters feel like cardboard creatures there to make a point. We don't even know what their marriage was like, with the one exception that he had affairs -- that's it.

As the daughter of a woman hospitalized with Alzheimers for ten years until her death, I can tell you from observing my mother and everyone around her that there are too many silly false notes to even detail here. Just for one, the idea that the woman is so far advanced that she is putting frying pans in the freezer, yet has the linguistic and cognitive skills to say "All we can aspire to is grace and dignity" is beyond ridiculous. No film I've ever seen, this one included, has the courage to show what really happens -- the loss of thinking, language, personality, desire to shower and dress, the insistent repetitions or cursing or anger, etc. It isn't a pretty picture, like the one glamorized here, as if you need the warm fuzzy glow ("Let's make love before you leave!") to mist over. What really infuriates me is how over-the-top everyone has praised this because it's so "beautiful."

This is not a social science film and it's not exactly an art film either. But neither is it just another version of Big Brother. I personally found this unique project profoundly moving in its originality. Through this film we get a deep sense of the way humans adjust to their circumstances, maintain their personalities and shape their own lives around what they want and can have. I had a sense of the innate decency of most human beings, our capacity for love and survival, the way in which character runs deeper than circumstances, but also the strong effect that circumstances such as the class one is born into can have on us. Most of all I was touched by the unpredictability of life: it would have been hard to say whose marriages would last and whose would not, for example.

Having said that, it is unclear to me why so many of the subjects, who volunteer to take part in the filming, seem to fear and oppose it so much. As someone who would have loved the opportunity to revisit my own life at different stages, I have a hard time understanding the reasons for their reluctance and even hostility.

Because this movie takes patience and doesn't depend on the usual understanding of plot and character, it's been under-appreciated, in my opinion. The opening segment takes place in the Sixties, followed by a trip into the past in the next segment, and into the future, i.e. the present, in the last. Because the same actors appear as lovers in all three, the movie invites us to compare historical interpretations of love and life, as well as see what is continuous in all three. Nothing much "happens" in any of the three, though there are small stories in each; the meaning of the movie lies in the sensibility and sensuous effects of each historical section. The beauty and dignity of the 1911 section is contrasted with the repulsiveness of the contemporary urban, industrialized and technological landscape, yet the modern women have a freedom that the heroine of the 1911 section could not dream about. The treatment of love is serious, yet also playful; love songs, love letters and smoking (tea a century ago) are all customs and codes of romance movies that are used ironically here. All in all, a masterful and interesting movie, but not for those who want fast-paced thrills.