I've watched this film twice and still don't know exactly how to respond to it. It's as if I'd been sawed in two, right down the sagittal plane. I'm impressed that the story was from Mario Vargas Llosa, a noted Peruvian novelist, essayist, and political figure. I mean, you can't help but admire a person who can become perhaps the most important writer of fiction in Latin America AND a serious candidate for president of Peru, who almost made it, by the way.
The movie is clearly ambitious. It takes risks that most aspiring blockbusters wouldn't dare. The story of two mismatched real-life lovers -- the older and wiser Barbara Hershey and the younger and dumber Keanu Reeves -- is intercut with a radio play. This is 1951, mind you, so radio plays are listened to religiously. The radio play, a kind of soap opera with medical interludes, is written by Peter Falk, who steals from actual incidents in the lives of others, including the conundrum of Hershey and Reeves.
The performances are uniformly good. Even Reeves is passable. Peter Falk is outrageously hammy. For reasons that are a little fuliginous he dresses up at various points as a dainty French maid, a dovening Rabbi, and an Irish Cardinal. It's full of diverse themes involving love, art, so-called real life, the sociology of enmity, and some others -- I guess. I got confused.
The problem is that none of these themes are explored in enough depth to make the story gripping rather than just interesting. Of course, one hopes for a happy outcome. And one gets it -- out of nowhere. When the two lovers are alone in a field, Falk shows up driving a fire engine, gives them his blessings, and takes off dressed in the Cardinal's robes.
The whole enterprise is more of a puzzle than a satisfying artifact. If it weren't for my own magnificent performance, which lifts the film into the realm of the celestial, but which I have discounted, I wouldn't know how to assess it. I'll have to leave the judgment to individual viewers.
The movie is clearly ambitious. It takes risks that most aspiring blockbusters wouldn't dare. The story of two mismatched real-life lovers -- the older and wiser Barbara Hershey and the younger and dumber Keanu Reeves -- is intercut with a radio play. This is 1951, mind you, so radio plays are listened to religiously. The radio play, a kind of soap opera with medical interludes, is written by Peter Falk, who steals from actual incidents in the lives of others, including the conundrum of Hershey and Reeves.
The performances are uniformly good. Even Reeves is passable. Peter Falk is outrageously hammy. For reasons that are a little fuliginous he dresses up at various points as a dainty French maid, a dovening Rabbi, and an Irish Cardinal. It's full of diverse themes involving love, art, so-called real life, the sociology of enmity, and some others -- I guess. I got confused.
The problem is that none of these themes are explored in enough depth to make the story gripping rather than just interesting. Of course, one hopes for a happy outcome. And one gets it -- out of nowhere. When the two lovers are alone in a field, Falk shows up driving a fire engine, gives them his blessings, and takes off dressed in the Cardinal's robes.
The whole enterprise is more of a puzzle than a satisfying artifact. If it weren't for my own magnificent performance, which lifts the film into the realm of the celestial, but which I have discounted, I wouldn't know how to assess it. I'll have to leave the judgment to individual viewers.