This is an overlong but fairly interesting film concerning events surrounding the infamous 'disappearances' in Argentina during the military rule of the 1970s.
The delightful Argentine actor Jazmin Stuart plays Manuela, the 20-year-old daughter of a woman who has committed suicide. The movie follows her attempts to unravel the mystery of why her mother took her own life. She is confronted by yet more mystery when a stranger from Barcelona named Luis Formosa (Dario Grandinetti) enters her life. What follows is a laboured attempt to find 'truth'; there's a lot of weeping and forced melodrama: who is Manuela, who is her mother, was Luis a traitor or wasn't he?
The Argentine 'underground' during the 1970s figures prominently in this film, but we never really find out much about them: we assume they are leftists of some kind, but, oddly, they're never named as such. This is an odd 'hole' in the script: half of the film is spent talking about the 'movement'; what movement?
There is a huge problem with this film besides its script flaws. It has to do with photography. At least half of the film appears to be shot in full or semi-darkness; a large part of it is in silhouette. This is the death knell for flicks on DVD, unless you have a mammoth 60-inch plasma screen at home. In a movie theatre, it might have been a different movie. On my small home TV, the whole thing was pretty well wasted on me. I literally couldn't SEE the characters a good deal of the time.
I'm guessing Ciudad del sol (City of the Sun) was so named in an attempt at crude metaphorical irony. There's not much sun in sight, but a whole lot of darkness. Neither the metaphors nor the irony worked, for me at least. The ending aims at high drama, and ends with low cheesy. The hackneyed and trite symbols of light vs. dark are embarrassingly overused, and its the cinematography that suffers.
The delightful Argentine actor Jazmin Stuart plays Manuela, the 20-year-old daughter of a woman who has committed suicide. The movie follows her attempts to unravel the mystery of why her mother took her own life. She is confronted by yet more mystery when a stranger from Barcelona named Luis Formosa (Dario Grandinetti) enters her life. What follows is a laboured attempt to find 'truth'; there's a lot of weeping and forced melodrama: who is Manuela, who is her mother, was Luis a traitor or wasn't he?
The Argentine 'underground' during the 1970s figures prominently in this film, but we never really find out much about them: we assume they are leftists of some kind, but, oddly, they're never named as such. This is an odd 'hole' in the script: half of the film is spent talking about the 'movement'; what movement?
There is a huge problem with this film besides its script flaws. It has to do with photography. At least half of the film appears to be shot in full or semi-darkness; a large part of it is in silhouette. This is the death knell for flicks on DVD, unless you have a mammoth 60-inch plasma screen at home. In a movie theatre, it might have been a different movie. On my small home TV, the whole thing was pretty well wasted on me. I literally couldn't SEE the characters a good deal of the time.
I'm guessing Ciudad del sol (City of the Sun) was so named in an attempt at crude metaphorical irony. There's not much sun in sight, but a whole lot of darkness. Neither the metaphors nor the irony worked, for me at least. The ending aims at high drama, and ends with low cheesy. The hackneyed and trite symbols of light vs. dark are embarrassingly overused, and its the cinematography that suffers.