Humaira Grant
It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.
Keeley Coleman
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Michael Neumann
It may be nothing more than highbrow cotton candy, but watching Timothy Hutton fall in and out of love with two beautiful women (while at the same time falling in and out of his vague Middle European accent) is an experience not without some incidental pleasure, silly as it is. Jerzy Skolimowski directed the multi-national (i.e. badly dubbed) cast, led by Hutton as a 19th century Russian aristocrat who (talk about bad luck) loves and loses both Valeria Golino and Nastassia Kinski. One is passionate and beautiful, the other is beautiful and passionate, and it's difficult to feel sorry for Hutton's mortal anguish in choosing between them The film abruptly ends just when the plot is beginning to thicken, but who needs narrative integrity with such romantic coffee table scenery, of ruined abbeys at dusk or horse drawn carriages gliding through misty tree-lined boulevards? The purple title and lush period setting make the film (based on an Ivan Turgenev story) a near perfect guilty pleasure, and it should be approached as such.
dmangibson-1
Turgenev's novel is ripe for cinematic treatment but Jerzy makes one wrong decision after another and sucks the life and drama out of the novel. Though Timothy Hutton is a serviceable lead -- his Russian dance though completely out of character and not in the book is a standout -- Valeria Golino is horribly miscast as is Kinski. The script also takes such liberties with the structure and characterizations that the movie ends up collapsing under its own weight. As the filmmaker never truly establishes Hutton's commitment and love for Gemma we don't care what happens between he and Kinski. Throughout the movie the director takes what were written as character scenes and opens them up into elaborate set pieces -- the fair, the opera, the masked ball -- underscoring his insecurity about our attachment to his characters and their wants and desires. He also has the most annoying directorial tic of starting almost every scene by dollying the camera behind some foreground element; flowers, tree branches, curtains and then finding our characters making their entrance. Miramax should have repo-ed the dolly and track and given him a tripod to stick the camera on.Turgenev deserves better. Read the book; it's much more cinematic on the page then in this film.One last question: what is William Forsythe doing in this movie?
cwazybill
This is a gorgeous movie. The photography is stunning. It develops stealthily into an unwilling and conflicted dual romance filled with good intentions, courage and traps. The participants confront their angels, then their equivalent personal demons. Later on, Sanin's (central male character) conflicts are portrayed as a subconscious journey in an eerie dreamland in which he tries to cope with inner conflicts and mysteries, and which, in the end, he is helpless to resolve, finally becoming totally dependent on time to do this for him. He is, despite all his worldly courage and altruism, weak in those things he loves most, paradoxically so, because they mean so much to him.The romantic scenes are intensely erotic, expanded more so, because of the beautiful photography.... even the sounds amplify the mood. This romantic and heroic Russian classic is a timeless story. Put it on film together with beautiful women, gorgeous photography, a far away place and time, and you have a film I think you will enjoy watching, and which may also have you asking a lot of questions about later.
Lanwench
This is an extremely amateurish, ham-handed film, with lousy accents, stilted dialogue, and a waste of the unconvincing Timothy Hutton as a disillusioned Russian nobleman (!!!)Valeria Golino is beautiful, but her character awfully two dimensional - and nobody could possibly believe Nastassja Kinski's hardboiled seductress. The entire film has that cheesy pan-European soft-focus quality found usually on late-night premium cable channels, but with a little less gratuitous nudity.However, there is a lovely scene wherein Nastassja and Timothy go to visit a Gypsy camp and dance around with ever-increasing attraction to one another. The music is fabulous, and there isn't much of the aforementioned crappy dialogue. If I could find just that scene on DVD, I'd buy it. Otherwise, give this one a pass.
