It's absolutely brilliant. The main character, a Czech immigrant named Selma, has a genetic disorder so that she is slowly losing her vision. If she can earn up the money, she can get her son Gene an operation so he doesn't have to deal with it. It has to be before he reaches adolescence, and he can't know about it, or his eyes may swell up from the stress and the operation may fail. Keep in mind this is set a few decades ago.
But that's just the skin of it. Selma's one real love is musicals. And so she turns her own life into a musical, to cheer her up and give her an escape. Selma is played by a Finnish singer named Bjork, whose very . . . untraditional voice gives the music a powerful and haunting quality that sticks in your mind for days. It's shot entirely with digital camera, and there's no music to induce moods (except Selma's mental musical mode) so it feels very real.
There's no attempt at Hollywood idealization and the ending is astonishing. The people are regular people--Selma certainly isn't a prom queen--and the low budget for fancy effects puts the whole movie squarely on the actors' shoulders.
Some people: a man who has a crush on Selma, played by the guy from Armageddon on the space station ("American parts, Soviet parts, all made in Taiwan!") and Selma's best friend, the gracefully aged French equivalent of Marylin Monroe.
This movie is fully worth going to the ends of the earth to see. Seriously.
Oh, and if after watching, you think of getting the soundtrack, that's good too, but the only singer who was in the movie on the soundtrack is Bjork. The others are all voiced by different singers.
Posts: 550 | Registered: Jan 2004
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I saw it at the end of my Melodrama class last year. I thought it was an excellent film and a pretty well-told story, though I didn't appreciate the rather heavy-handed anti-American message. The intertwining of Selma's love of song-and-dance musical spectacle and the bizarre Soviet-style machine rythyms of the movie's musical interludes is just fantastic. "I've Seen it All" is a hauntingly beautiful piece, especially the version that's sung by Thom Yorke.
There was one American History X-level horrible moment in it, that would definitely keep me from recommending it to anyone who finds themselves deeply affected by disturbing scenes in films.
Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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I'm sorry but I didn't like the movie. SPOILERS The scene of the murder and of the execution seemed sordid and morbid to me. The beginning was good, though. Ayelar, I guess you recomandation for persons who are disturbed by some scenes applies to me quite well. I have to add to be honest that when I saw this movie my mother just died and I never saw it again, but I keep a powerful bad memory of it.
[ May 02, 2004, 11:22 AM: Message edited by: Anna ]
Posts: 3526 | Registered: Oct 2001
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I totally understand, Anna. I saw it almost a year ago, and I'm just starting to be able to think about it dispassionately. There should be a special rating system for movies with moments like those. American History X, Dancer in the Dark, and The Green Mile are all good movies that I wish I had no memory of. Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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I don't list it as one I wished I had no memory of, but it does go on my list of "Excellent Movies that are Hard to Watch". Other movies on that list are "Requiem for a Dream", and "American History X".
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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What anti-American message? It was a good movie, but too melodramatic... That director also did Breaking the Waves which features the AWESOME actress Emily Watson and is very simular to this movie. Utterly depressing... But Bjork's acting was just amazing in it.
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Ooh, maybe I'll have them order it for me at the store.
I also thought Requiem was very hard to watch, and it left me pretty...upset with life for a few days. American History X wasn't _as_ difficult, though there were some parts that got a "cringe and bury head under pillow" reaction. I thought they were great movies, though.
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From what I remember, there was a heavy sense of "Americans are greedy and out to screw foreigners" vs. "Us immigrants see beyond our differences and help each other out, unlike those evil Americans". I thought the situation was distorted to emphasize this... I mean, hello, even in the 60s or 70s Americans weren't so callous and bloody-minded to persecute (I mean prosecute) a mother for trying to save her son. All she had to do was MENTION it to someone and she would have been taken care of. That always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
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I don't think it really portrayed anyone as bad, except maybe that bastard landlord of hers. Everyone else was just, well, uninformed. And anti-Communist.
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