For years, I've heard glowing praise of this movie....now that I've seen it, I feel the praise is largely undeserved.
The movie gets off to a bad start: It's unclear (at least from the subtitled version I saw) where the heck the characters are. It's obviously Europe and some kind of World War II era camp, but that's all I could glean....And in the early scenes with Miou Miou, where her first husband gets shot, it wasn't clear who was doing the shooting and/or why. According to the description on this site, it was the "resistance," whatever that means....(to be fair: perhaps most Europeans in 1983 understood the history without needing reference books, but this U.S. home video viewer in 2002 would have appreciated a bit more historical context)
As for the rest of the film....Slow, slow, slow. And with a lot of extraneous elements that never seemed to go anywhere.
Frankly, I was hoping for more romance between the two women, which you never really see. You just get Isabelle Huppert's husband being angry all the time.
And for the record, I didn't like the way the Miou-Miou character kept insulting her young son. None of these characters were particularly likeable, not even Isabelle Huppert. The ugliness of the characters detracted from my enjoyment of this, too.
I suppose this was considered really "avant garde" or something, in terms of subject matter, back in 1983, when it was released. But today it just falls really flat. A disappointment.
The movie gets off to a bad start: It's unclear (at least from the subtitled version I saw) where the heck the characters are. It's obviously Europe and some kind of World War II era camp, but that's all I could glean....And in the early scenes with Miou Miou, where her first husband gets shot, it wasn't clear who was doing the shooting and/or why. According to the description on this site, it was the "resistance," whatever that means....(to be fair: perhaps most Europeans in 1983 understood the history without needing reference books, but this U.S. home video viewer in 2002 would have appreciated a bit more historical context)
As for the rest of the film....Slow, slow, slow. And with a lot of extraneous elements that never seemed to go anywhere.
Frankly, I was hoping for more romance between the two women, which you never really see. You just get Isabelle Huppert's husband being angry all the time.
And for the record, I didn't like the way the Miou-Miou character kept insulting her young son. None of these characters were particularly likeable, not even Isabelle Huppert. The ugliness of the characters detracted from my enjoyment of this, too.
I suppose this was considered really "avant garde" or something, in terms of subject matter, back in 1983, when it was released. But today it just falls really flat. A disappointment.