Reviews

This is a beautiful film, where Sven Wollter makes one of his greatest performances. But I can't see any any artistic reasons to give Viveka Seldahl a guldbagge for her contribution - she makes the lines as if they didn´t really engaged her (more as if she read them aloud from a script). And the language of the female doctor is definitely not natural spoken language. For example: today in Sweden, even doctors don´t say "herr Fischer" (Mr Fischer) to their patients, they say the first name. (Maybe the film makers were influenced by the American way of thinking and talking.) But - as a whole, the film is very well done and definitely worth seeing.

Jostein Gaarder has written a book that is a good introduction to philosophy for young people (and other beginners). Sofie Amundsen is a fifteen year old girl, who meets the mystic philosopher Alberto Knox. Thereby she gets a profound education in the story of philosophy. But unfortunately, the film is something totally different. I counted the philosophers that were even mentioned - they were only six. Instead Sofie gets to travel in time and space, experience the Renaissance, the Russian revolution etc; and thereby she gets to meet some prominent people, such as Shakespeare and da Vinci - or, more correctly, their stereotypes. I don't see anything interesting in this. My opinion is that this film is superficial and meaningless, although it 's technically well done with skilful actors in the main characters. The problem, I think, is that philosophy is not a visual subject.