Marketic It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Tedfoldol everything you have heard about this movie is true.

Invaderbank The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Lela The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

leplatypus « black swan » and this movie are twins because they take the same Tchaikovsky ballet with the same supernatural treatment : personality split. I don't buy serendipity and as always, the first try is the more interesting : here, we have the opportunity to go to Budapest. Next, we don't have gratuitous trendy sex but a classic candid romance instead. If Jen and Natalie are as much candid and good ballerina, there is more dark poetry here than later. Sure the movie is much less psychotic or disturbing, it has no awards or box-office but it's not about a difference in quality: the (long) final looks also like "Godfather III" with action happening in a opera house but reveals a funny surprise as well!

MARIO GAUCI This has been getting a belated reputation (I admit to being totally unfamiliar with it prior to a recommendation from a Maltese friend of mine last week!) as a sort of dry-run for one of last year's most acclaimed films, BLACK SWAN. In fact, it similarly deals with a young and beautiful ballerina whose life is inextricably altered when she applies for the starring role of the famous Tchaikovsky opus "Swan Lake" (though here everything eventually works its way to a happy ending).While it does not go into the psychological avenues taken by Darren Aronofsky's recent effort, the film nonetheless plays out like a Kafkaesque thriller – with the two protagonists (the hero is a likable fellow American who happens to stay on the same floor of her Budapest hotel) sucked in by a vortex of surreal events that literally transcends the passage of time! If anything, ETOILE also recalls Hitchcock's VERTIGO (1958) in equal measures, as ageing and crippled impresario/dancer(!) Laurent Terzieff moulds leading lady Jennifer Connelly (still in her Euro-fantasy phase that had kicked off with Dario Argento's typically elaborate PHENOMENA [1984] and also comprised Jim Henson's kiddie film LABYRINTH [1986]) into a prima ballerina from a past age who had perished tragically after a performance. Interestingly, 17 year-old Connelly – though she is meant to be spell-bound and, thus, also unable to recognize the young man – slips into the intricacies of her dual role much more easily than Natalie Portman in BLACK SWAN! A dilapidated country-house also plays a central part in the 're-enactment' – where the male lead (whose life had until then been controlled by art-collecting uncle Charles Durning, who is himself mysteriously hypnotized at one point, gets violent towards his relative and hit by a passing car!) eventually goes to meet the evil head-on just as the Tchaikovsky ballet is being played out on stage. He has to fight with a giant black swan which, when he kills, Terzieff falls dead in mid-performance elsewhere! In the end, while hardly a lost classic, this is a reasonably interesting (and stylish) effort, regardless of the BLACK SWAN connotations which will probably be attributed to it from here on in

lor_ Thanks to a poor script and the woeful direction of Peter Del Monte, ETOILE was a flop in 1988, never released (to this day) in the U.S. despite being filmed in English with American leading actors. Suddenly it takes on new interest as a direct forerunner of the current hit BLACK SWAN.Jennifer Connelly, who gives a glazed performance especially compared with the all-stops-out tour de force of Natalie Portman, plays an American ballerina named Claire traveling to Budapest to further her career. She is possessed by the spirit of a ballerina from 1891 who danced her final performance there in "Swan Lake".A chilling early scene has Claire receiving a bouquet of black flowers with a note: "Welcome back Natalie". This refers to the 1891 ballerina named Natalie Horvath, but today gives off an eerie note with the coincidence of actress Portman's first name some 22 years later in such a similar role.Both films deal with loss of identity, but ETOILE adopts a very cornball Gothic romance style which falls flat. In fact everything about the film is flat except Connelly's torso (see her in CAREER OPPORTUNITIES made a couple of years later and you'll see what I mean). The romantic male lead Gary McCleery (whose career went nowhere) is terrible - a blank space on the screen, and an endless subplot concerning his uncle, played hammily by Charles Durning, obsessed with buying rare clocks, merely kills time.The ballet master was well-cast with Laurent Terzieff, a wonderful, creepy looking French actor, better casting than Vincent Cassel in the new film, but unfortunately Terzieff has little to do. Similarly, scarily beautiful Olimpia Carlisi is wasted as an evil black queen figure.In the '80s I watched all of Del Monte's films that were in fact imported to America -watching them in 35mm I can give a fair appraisal. SWEET PEA was merely cute, I greatly enjoyed INVITATION AU VOYAGE (which was an art-house flop here when released by Columbia's Triumph Films subsidiary), and JULIA & JULIA was a disaster, a millstone on Kathleen Turner's otherwise booming career at the time. With ETOILE Del Monte comes off as just another hack.

undertakercowboyatyahoodotcom As the first and so far only review of this film I will summarise the plot for any of you who feel like taking on the challenge of finding a copy of this film. The story follows Jennifer Connelly, a ballerina, and her exploits as she grows closer to the leading male in the film, only then for mysterious things to start happening. I wont say any more regarding the plot because it's pretty thin, one more sentence about it would pretty much tell you everything that happens in it. This is not the worst film I have ever seen, but it's also far from the best. Stuff happens without explanation, and it's not easy to figure out for yourself why said stuff happened. Connelly looks like she would rather be somewhere else at times, and so her performance lacks charisma. So considering the film rides on her performance, it would probably be quite apt to say that the whole film lacks charisma. I gave it 4 out of 10.