From the review I read in the local newspaper, I was expecting this to be a comedy about the travails of making a movie during wartime in Britain. It's not that, but I'm not sure what it is instead.
There are certainly funny moments, but they and the romantic moments are sometimes - deliberately, it seems - cheek by jowl with unexpected and very severe tragedy. Every now and then the movie reminds us, in the most direct and usually unprepared way, that life in London during the bombing was terrible, and that many lives were shattered when they were not altogether destroyed.
Still, even after several such sudden tragic moments, I was jarred by the death of the male lead, the screen writer, when he was killed not by a bomb but by a large shelf that collapsed on top of him. I felt resentful that I was being played with, as much as sorry for the woman who loved him and had just seen him crushed before her eyes.
Sometimes I had the impression the script for this movie, which others have praised but which I did not like, was in fact written as we see the script of the movie-within-a-movie, Dunkirk, being written in this movie: scenes dashed off, often out of order, by several people not always working together.
That said, and much to my surprise, I found myself very moved by some of the scenes we see at the end of the movie from "Dunkirk". They look cheaply made, nothing like "Mrs. Miniver", for example, which was the great Hollywood effort to convince Americans to go into the war to help the British, but yet they are moving in their simplicity, even through we have seen those same lines butchered during rehearsal previously.
This is not a bad movie, by any means. But for me, it was sometimes an aggravating one, which is why I only gave it a 6.
There are certainly funny moments, but they and the romantic moments are sometimes - deliberately, it seems - cheek by jowl with unexpected and very severe tragedy. Every now and then the movie reminds us, in the most direct and usually unprepared way, that life in London during the bombing was terrible, and that many lives were shattered when they were not altogether destroyed.
Still, even after several such sudden tragic moments, I was jarred by the death of the male lead, the screen writer, when he was killed not by a bomb but by a large shelf that collapsed on top of him. I felt resentful that I was being played with, as much as sorry for the woman who loved him and had just seen him crushed before her eyes.
Sometimes I had the impression the script for this movie, which others have praised but which I did not like, was in fact written as we see the script of the movie-within-a-movie, Dunkirk, being written in this movie: scenes dashed off, often out of order, by several people not always working together.
That said, and much to my surprise, I found myself very moved by some of the scenes we see at the end of the movie from "Dunkirk". They look cheaply made, nothing like "Mrs. Miniver", for example, which was the great Hollywood effort to convince Americans to go into the war to help the British, but yet they are moving in their simplicity, even through we have seen those same lines butchered during rehearsal previously.
This is not a bad movie, by any means. But for me, it was sometimes an aggravating one, which is why I only gave it a 6.