Reviews

This movie is a sad illustration of how a wonderful book and an extremely interesting idea can be massacred into a ridiculous movie. Poorly directed and artificially filled with useless, time consuming scenes, this movie also "benefits" from incredibly bad acting. I would definitely rate it R for ridiculous.

Or maybe it is me. Maybe I had too high expectancies. To be honest, I was dying to see how the complex micro-universe of the couple is seen under the magnifying glass of erotism. I expected to see two interesting characters able to redefine (sexual) happiness in their couple. I thought I would witness two sexually aware people facing the decision of holding their eyes "wide shut" and learning to live with their fantasies. All that directed by Kubrick should have been quite a treat, shouldn't it?

The only good scene of the movie, that of the orgy, is entirely copied from Fellini. All the rest of the movie is doomed to silliness and ridicule.

Nicole Kidman is unable to articulate herself in normally-paced English and almost all her scenes are absolutely ridiculous. The last scene is a masterpiece in this direction. " I... think... that... we... should... be... grateful." That takes her 5 minutes. After that, exhausted by the effort of putting into words her abysmal feelings, she utters the F word again. Which word is so much abused in this movie that it loses even its vulgarity. Everything was bad enough, but that ending was also annoying.

The movie could have ended with the scene of her sleeping with the Venetian mask and saved us from another few scenes of pathetic stupidity and poor taste. Well, we weren't that lucky.

Tom Cruise's acting was far beyond any critique. I have a hard time believing that he was aware of the fact that he was in a movie. It's pretty difficult to pick up such thing as his worst scene, but I guess he was particularly efficient in making the last scene with Victor Ziegler absolutely laughable.

Stanley Kubrick, whom I still admire for some of his films, must have died out of shame for having directed such a profligate assault to the cinematographic good taste. Or maybe, knowing that that was his last movie, he did not want us to regret him too much as an artist. Whichever it was, he was tremendously successful, at least as far as I am concerned.

Isa and Marie are two refusals of the ugliness of life, of the bitterness of the inequality of chances. Both of them poor and uneducated, doomed to the everyday failure of small jobs and sentimental promiscuity, Isa and Marie try to escape their condition. Isa does that with a not-so-broken smile. She accepts every job possible and she cares a lot about Sabrine, the unknown girl in a coma whose diary Isa gets to read. Beautiful scene that one in which Isa writes in Sabrine's journal in a desperate attempt to keep the frozen life of the girl going.

Marie is savage and protects herself form unhappiness by being the first one who hurts. Until she gets in love with a rich and beautiful man. Their relationship, impossible but so tempting tears her friendship with Isa in pieces. The end of her love story is also the end of all her dreams, so she jumps over the window, acquiring "la vie revee des anges".

At first I thought that Isa, the good one of the two friends, won the race with a hostile fate, Marie being the loser. But the final scene - Isa in a white overall working in a factory, a pale face among other pale faces - made me thought that the opposite thought is also legitimate. Or maybe both of them won - Marie by renouncing a sordid life, Isa by accepting its challenges.

But this movie is not only its plot and its characters. The atmosphere, the music, the image have the French (good) taste I'm dying for.

"Glissando" means a smooth movement along a surface. In Mircea Daneliuc's movie the surface is the luxuriant reality of the effervescent and lavish Romanian bourgeoisie between the two World Wars.

The main character skates on the thin, cracked surface of that reality, terribly infelicitously equipped for survival. His main resources are those of the disappearing nobility - courteousness, deep understanding and endless love for art, irreproachable gallantry with women, a beautiful use of both language and silence, a strong propensity for idealism and introspection.

The reality, in all its cruelty and vulgarity, is introduced by a "nouveau riche" character torturing his children to recite Verlaine and play the violin as a proof of how much money he invested in their education. This aggressively healthy and disgracefully wealthy specimen invites Stefan Iordache at his domain, thinking that some of the glittery manners of his guest might rub off on himself.

The loud coarseness of the "nouveau riche" threatens to spoil the whole summer, but the reality slides away when Stefan Iordache's character encounters "the man in the dream".

This man, slim, tall and obviously one of the last true nobles of his time, always accompanied by a child, has the physical appearance of a strange man that used to appear in all Stefan Iordache's dreams since childhood. Always silent and accompanied by a mute, pale and wide-eyed child, the man was invariably there providing him with comfort in all those strange and inexplicably threatening situations that occur in dreams.

In real life "the man in the dream" appears as an old inveterate gambler who has to sell all the leftovers of his fortune to cover his gambling debts.

Helpless and humiliated by people and events, the man in the dream is there, in the reality, only to point out that the destruction approaching the "belle epoque" world was so terrible that not even dreams could resist it.

The difference between dream and reality gets thinner and thinner day by day, so that Stefan Iordache finds himself confronted with more and more lack of sense, the whole world turning into a Kafka-like scene. The whole world is compressed and the camera moves from mental hospitals and hospices to casinos. In a chest X ray Stefan Iordache sees his own body inhabited by the man in the dream and the mute, pale boy. The boundaries between fantasy and reality are turning smokier and the man is confused on every plane of his existence.

The values he believed in begin to disappear, the man in the dream turns out to be a loser himself, love is little else than lust and conspiracy for survival. The character played by Tora Vasilescu, a governess that becomes the lover of Stefan Iordache offers one of the best cinematographic portraits of love seen as complicity and deliberate refusal of spirituality, of devouring and primitive femininity triumphing over the masculine need of understanding. While still in love and desperately longing for a woman we only see in a picture, Stefan Iordache is enslaved by Tora Vasilescu's fiery erotism, by her capability to ignore everything that is not real and conducive to personal well-being.

The confusion in Stefan Iordache's life is accompanied by the social changes preluding the World War II, so the dream becomes more and more a gold lame fabric stained with blood. The final scene of the movie is a comprehensive metaphor for both fascism and communism erupting as a flood of dirty water from underground. The personal drama of having the dream killed by reality takes over the whole world and there is no escape from the mundane rush of history.

Artfully made, "Glissando" is not only one of those films about the human condition that follow one years and years after one sees it. It is also a directorial and scenographic masterpiece. Scenes like the one with the old men in the bathhouse could be seen as separate films, as unforgettable lessons of cinematographic art.

The human body uses the dance language to tell the simple story of damned love. The ballet, far from being a tool incidental to communication, carries within itself a whole body of assumptions about love and death, about sin and punishment.

The story line is simple. A bride elopes with her lover in the very day of her wedding. The groom follows the two lovers, and a knife fight takes place. The rivals stab each other and the only wedding that takes place is that one knotting their destinies together in death. A blood wedding.

Besides from the unearthly beauty of the dance spilling out of the dancers bodies on the Flamenco rhythm, the film goes a long way toward shaping and determining the kind of thoughts one is able to have on the controversial topic of sinful love.