NekoHomey Purely Joyful Movie!

Tockinit not horrible nor great

GarnettTeenage The film was still a fun one that will make you laugh and have you leaving the theater feeling like you just stole something valuable and got away with it.

Stephanie There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

SnoopyStyle Anna (Kathryn Worth) is having marital problems and spending the summer holiday family friends Verena (Mary Roscoe), Charlie (Michael Hadley) and George (David Rintoul) at their Tuscan villa. She starts to spend more time with the younger teenage children Archie (Harry Kershaw), Badge (Emma Hiddleston), Jack (Henry Lloyd-Hughes) and Oakley (Tom Hiddleston). They smoke some weed and crash a car. The sexual tension boils over as she flirts with the leader of the kids Oakley.It's a British mumbletalk indie. I wish the relationships between the characters are laid out more clearly early on. It would help decipher and build a backstory to their connections if they have any. They need to throw in a few lines like "I haven't seen you since you were this tall." It would help to build tension in the first half of the movie. The older people also need to have some in-depth talk in the first half. It would fill out their characters. Anna has very curt conversations with Verena. This feels like a bunch of strangers and it's not until the second half that things get a little bit interesting.

plonk7 Someone once said, "It's the singer, not the song". Here, it's difficult to know which is responsible for the effect created by this film -- the cast, or the writing (and by extension, directing). Certainly, Ms. Hogg deserves credit for her sure, understated camera-work and pithy screenplay. The film demonstrates, in equal measure, both a sense of forward movement (in terms of plot and tension), and a verisimilitude of action and speech. There is a quasi-documentary feel to the proceedings; we enter and view scenes from odd angles, with the camera in a corner, or down a hall from the intended dialogue; scenes begin and end in medias res. The effect is never, however, mannered or jarring, but is calculated for maximum dispatch in terms of character and plot development.However, the performances themselves are so fine, so delicately thatched and inked as to leave the impression of real people, and not "roles" played by professionals. Chief among them is Ms. Worth's turn as Anna, who is not quite as hapless, or feckless, as some of the other reviewers on this site would have indicated. It is interesting to see those viewers' reactions to her pass at the younger Oakley which characterize it as disgusting, or out-of-touch. In another movie (say an Irvine Welsh adaptation, for instance) a woman like Anna would get at least two fairly raunchy sex scenes. This is not to short-change Ms. Worth's physical attractiveness; in fact, the heat between her character and that of Mr. Hiddleston's is palpable. But Ms. Hogg is not after the same sort of effect as Irvine Welsh; this film is a slow-burner. And Ms. Worth finds her footing surely in the lazy Tuscan atmosphere, conveying thousands of words with just a look. Take, for instance, her semi-squint in reaction to Oakley's prying questions about children. The answer is writ large between the drawn-up lower lids, the slight pucker to the mouth. Further to Ms. Worth's credit is that her background is theatre and opera (she has done some choral roles with major productions) neither of which genre is famous for the slight gesture, or subtlety of reading. Here, though, she is "playing chamber music", and not blasting grand opera to the back of the house. All told, this is probably one of the best films to come across this reviewer's screen in the last twenty years.

paul2001sw-1 'Unrelated' has an intriguing premise: a forty-something woman, on the run from an unhappy relationship, takes refuge in a Tuscan villa with an old (but not, it seems, particularly close) friend; and in fact, prefers to spend her time with the younger generation, perhaps trying to re-imagine the youth that got away. There's lots of potential here, and some acute observation, but also some flatness: director Joanna Hogg skilfully captures the mood of a particularly awful house-party, but it's not the sort of place that feels particularly enticing, and the combination of Anna's stupidity and the spoiled obnoxiousness of the beautiful youths who entrance her make for an unappealing and painful combination. If the story falls short of neat conclusions, it also falls short of what normally defines a good story - and the excessive use of static camera shots, leaving the viewer like a guest who'd rather be somewhere else, isn't especially subtle. Overall, this might have been better at half the length: there are some worthwhile ideas, but scene after scene of Anna sitting, painfully on the edge of a social gathering, feels unnecessary.

Jiff D The way that the film is shot and edited, particularly the long-shots, the dramatic use of artificial silences (where the soundtrack is dropped altogether) and the Attenboroughesque cut-to-cut montage of the landscape is a lot like something from Rohmer. A Summer's Tale, in particular. The director uses these techniques in a way which, as in Rohmer, complements the subtleties and natural feeling of the plot itself. There is a smooth marriage of the realistic content and this restrained and unobtrusive visual style. Perhaps only such metaphorical marriages can be so smooth.Superficially, the story, mise-en-scene and characters also are Rohmeresque. The drama is internal and psychological, the characters are drawn from the upper middle-classes, and they are- as is often the case in Rohmer's films- on holiday; variously enjoying themselves and wondering why they are not, or are incapable, of doing so. It's as though Marie Riviere's character in Rohmer's 'The Green Ray' didn't meet her true love in the train station in Bayonne(?) at the end of the film and is, to heartbreaking effect, trying once more some fifteen years later, post-menopausal, after a disappointing marriage.Though this is to romanticise the connection too much: Rohmer's film was mysterious, modern fairy-tale about love and its link to private superstitions. Joanna Hogg's film takes place on a rougher plane as earthly and scarred, to use the obvious simile, as the Tuscan fields against which it unfolds. It does successfully what, I think anyway, Michael Haneke's 'The Piano Teacher' failed to do, which is to show the vulnerability of the repressed, middle-aged woman whose world is almost demolished by a manipulative, handsome young man. But it is complex, and what upsets Anne most is not the rejection but the guilt of her subsequent revenge. Haneke used fairy-tale tropes, too- this time, the wicked, domineering, passive-aggressive mother (is this a wider tendency of male European directors?), in a highly stylised film, with a typically strident performance from Isabelle Huppert. Haneke always tries too hard to shock- whether its sniffing spunk-stained tissues in the peep-show or self-mutilation in the bathroom. It's strangely dull. Hogg shows Anne being delicately led astray, with a subtler cruelty: the expression of anticipation on her face when they play the "Pass the Orange" game, alone, will make you wince with your whole body.The performances are all good. The faults are very minor: the "youngs" are only slightly exaggerated. The husband of Anne's friend seemed potentially more sympathetic- his character might have been better-developed (but perhaps this was deliberate, and he is a "hen-pecked" husband).Thank you, Ms. Hogg, for a very truthful film.