Afouotos
Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
RipDelight
This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.
Aneesa Wardle
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
kurosawakira
Beauty that reveals more beauty. Erice's sense of light and shadow is painterly beyond belief, especially in how it's used in transitions and to actually denote an internal change in the scene. I wonder why so few directors think this way. Perhaps because it's too subtle and too difficult, two things that don't go hand in hand (you can be subtle if it's easy, or it can be difficult as long as you're as unsubtle as possible so that you people see what you're doing). Tarkovsky, Malick and Tarr come to mind who share a similar affinity with light, Kubrick as well.Knowing that the director initially wanted to film the second half as well brings an essential contextual dimension of incompleteness - hopes of relationships projected onto an idea of an unknown future, never seen in the film; a past similarly untold and hidden (of one's parents, in this case). And that moment in the cafè! As a father of three who also lost a father at an early age (illness), the irrevocable sense of loss cuts deep: the look in his eyes, the sense of amiss, the intensity between knowing and not knowing. The fact that Antonutti looks like a younger Arvo Pärt only adds to it, if you're familiar with the latter's work.I haven't yet seen Erice's third film, "El Sor del Membrillo" (1992), but based on these two transcendental experiences it should be a perfect match to go with two wonderful contemporary films on painters, Rivette's "La belle noiseuse" (1991) and Pialat's "Van Gogh" (1991).
Hedgehog_Carnival
I liked this movie, but was mildly surprised to find it getting, here, the uncritical praise it has done.First of all, for those who haven't seen it, it's a film that gets people raving first and foremost not about the acting (which is excellent, if a little too dispassionate and throttled-back in Antonutti's case for my own tastes), nor the plot (which is resolutely episodic) but the cinematography. The best way I can describe it is to say that it's shot like a succession of Rembrandt paintings brought to life. If ever a film's lighting stole the show, this film is it. Ten out of ten on that score.Secondly, for those who have seen it, well, didn't anyone else notice what to me was the film's one big flaw? I mean the POV question. Here you have a beautifully filmed version of a subtle, sensitive story of a young girl's relationship with her father. All the way through there is frequent offscreen narrative punctuation in the first person. It's a story quite clearly /told/ from the girl's POV, and all the director needed to do was make sure it was /consistently seen/ from that point of view, both in terms of preferred camera angles and in terms of the information we are allowed access to - and we might have had a full-blown masterpiece on our hands. Instead, the strength and emotional intensity of the film are constantly being diluted by (it seems to me) wholly unnecessary interpolations of information the girl herself /could not have had access to/ (e.g. and most notably, the contents of the letter her father receives from his old flame). Thus, we are artificially distanced from the sense of mystery felt by her by knowing more than she does at key moments, and more than we really need to know ourselves. The magical realism element should have been respected just a little more than it was.I also think that another less fastidious director might have found ways of quietly pointing up the contributions made by the various narrative episodes (the potentially v. powerful water-divining scene, the relatives' visit, the cinema poster, the glimpse through the cafe window, the lie told to Mum, the graffiti-mad boyfriend) to the film's overarching theme: a vital but absent and mysterious "South" that runs like an underground stream through the girl's youthful, very Northerly experience. The idea is a beautiful one, and the film sort of captures it, but only if you run with the idea yourself quite a bit between scenes. I don't know if the audience's sympathetic imagination needs to be made to work /quite/ so hard in this medium, where just /showing/ is so easy to do.In short, I think this film is excellent, but could have been better than it was, and deserves a remake.
jsorribe
After "The Spirit of the Beehive" Erice retakes post-civil war Spain through the eyes of a child (and later a teenager in this case). Not only the director recreates admirably the atmosphere of those gloomy years in my country, but also succeeds in showing the relationship between a bitter, low-spirited father and his vital daughter. Wonderful cinematography and sets also contribute to create a masterwork in which every camera move, every dialogue line and every fade constitute a brilliant piece of its own. An absolute must for all cinema lovers.
Peter B. Ives
I feel compelled to relate this as it has been at least ten years since I saw this film (in a student union theater) and it still has a powerful hold on my memory. I have been unable to find it on video, so my recollections are fragmentary.I was so impressed, involved, and moved by this tale that I left the cinema feeling as if I were floating just above the pavement. One is quietly and adroitly drawn in by the mystery that the young daughter in 1950s Spain senses in her father. The political dimension is brilliantly nuanced, carefully alluded to without speechifying. The wondrous cinematography captures light so deftly at times that it is almost luminous: late afternoon sunlight across a room, snow slowly falling (viewed through a window), a rain soaked street at night. As the daughter grows to adolescence the enigma of her reticent father begins to clear. It may not sound like much in my words, but from wool Victor Erice has spun gold.
