Review of Head in the Clouds

Okay, Charlize Theron is gorgeous and sexy. Penelope Cruz the same. Stuart Townsend is good looking. And the story line might have made for an interesting movie. Spoiled rich girl (Theron) has simultaneous love affairs with young Englishman (Townsend) who she first met at Cambridge University and lame Spanish strip-tease artist (Cruz). The setting is Paris, pre-World War II. She lives for the moment. They are idealists who go off to Spain to support the Republican side in the Civil War. Cruz' character, who's become a field nurse, dies. Spoiled rich girl is sleeping with someone else when young Englishman returns. She rejects him. He goes back to England. World War II breaks out and in 1944 he is parachuted into France to help the French underground. Spoiled rich girl is now living with a German officer. She's reviled by the locals as a collaborator and a whore. But, it turns out, she's secretly working with the underground and saves young Englishman's hide when the Germans learn about a rendezvous he's planning with another underground operator in a local bistro. He and his friends in the underground blow up a train but the obligatory girl member of the underground is caught, tortured and killed by spoiled rich girl's Nazi lover. As German control of Paris disintegrates, Nazi lover is shot by an underground sniper in their apartment/love nest and spoiled rich girl is taken away by the underground to be humiliated and then, one assumes, shot, hanged or at least beaten bloody. The above summary, however, suggests that the film is coherent, which it isn't. The director is not very successful in maintaining narrative tension, and at moments when members of the audience ought to be on the edge of their seats, they are very likely to be yawning. Director seems to have concentrated all of his effort on the sex scenes which are very steamy, especially one where spoiled rich girl and young Englishman get it on in a bath tub. Sex between spoiled rich girl and lame Spanish strip-tease artist is hinted at but not shown. All of this wastes a pretty good performance by Theron. Cruz is given relatively little to do. Townsend is overmatched. Not a bad movie. Just not a good one.