If you look at the cast names, as I did when the credits rolled, you may think you're in for a wonderful time. You're not. There is something about Western society in the past half-century or so: Our self-appointed social visionaries can't relinquish the silly idea that sex and more sex will release us from our backward hangups, usher in a new era of equality and peace, and maybe do the ironing, too. Despite all evidence to the contrary since the '60s, this conviction is advanced with energy and enthusiasm bordering on obsessive/compulsive disorder. The rest of us can only watch in bored disenchantment and growing impatience.
This movie really has nothing to say. It makes a few gestures about free will clashing with priggish authoritarianism. There's some gas-bagging about importance of ahhht and ahhhtists. Some women are stripped bare by a director who evidently feels he has something to say. ...And ...we watch in bored disenchantment and growing impatience. There's a scene about halfway in, set as theatrical production by asylum inmates under direction of the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush, in acting service above and beyond the call of duty). He's burdened with a thudding, anachronistic line about shocking his audience with... the truth or something. It would be fine burbled at some academia cocktail party; not so convincing a sentiment in 18th-century France. The scene is supposed to be deliriously funny and invigorating as the prudes have their nose rubbed in clumsily staged sex acts. It fails on both counts. This is the time to go out front for a cigarette, beer or mind-numbing narcotic, just to shake out the fake laughter banging in your head.
Where's Peter Brook when we really need him? I give it three stars for great cinematography and art direction. Minus-two for storyline philosophy that should've been junked with all those old Hot Tuna albums.
This movie really has nothing to say. It makes a few gestures about free will clashing with priggish authoritarianism. There's some gas-bagging about importance of ahhht and ahhhtists. Some women are stripped bare by a director who evidently feels he has something to say. ...And ...we watch in bored disenchantment and growing impatience. There's a scene about halfway in, set as theatrical production by asylum inmates under direction of the Marquis (Geoffrey Rush, in acting service above and beyond the call of duty). He's burdened with a thudding, anachronistic line about shocking his audience with... the truth or something. It would be fine burbled at some academia cocktail party; not so convincing a sentiment in 18th-century France. The scene is supposed to be deliriously funny and invigorating as the prudes have their nose rubbed in clumsily staged sex acts. It fails on both counts. This is the time to go out front for a cigarette, beer or mind-numbing narcotic, just to shake out the fake laughter banging in your head.
Where's Peter Brook when we really need him? I give it three stars for great cinematography and art direction. Minus-two for storyline philosophy that should've been junked with all those old Hot Tuna albums.