Reviews

The worst movie I have seen in quite a while. Interesting first half with some engaging, terse dialogue among dubious characters in a late-night bar. The movie then degenerates into a shapeless succession of scenes aiming for visual shock (read disgust) without any redeeming observations or lessons in humanity or anything else.

I wanted to walk out, but the director was present at this showing and my politeness preventing me from showing him disrespect. Still, time is precious (as the director himself observed in his intro) and I really begrudge the time I wasted on the second half of this one.

Saving graces were the three main characters in the first half of the movie, especially the female lead.

Ok, this was my first Soviet-era Russian movie, so it was difficult to assess by my (western) standards. By those standards the characters seemed simplistic and exaggerated, and the screenplay cliché-ridden. Also, by those standards, the cinematography came across as ill-developed for the day.

However, 'Cruel Romance' was something of a revelation for me. Just as the American Dream is expressed repeatedly (ad nauseam?) in Hollywood movies, I had a strong feeling after watching this movie that the 'Russian Dream' had been laid bare for my comprehension at last. The worship of impossible romance combined with blindness to all practical considerations and the expression of that romance in the gift of expensive baubles and other grand gestures are the main threads running through this story. And, despite the fact that 'Cruel Romance' is a Soviet-era depiction of 19th century Tsarist Russia, these are cultural traits to be found in abundance in modern-day Russians. For this reason watching the movie was a treat to me personally, and henceforth I will view my Russian friends and colleagues with a slightly higher degree of understanding.

Also, I hope to see many more Russian movies in the future !

This movie starts very promisingly and, in classic David Lynch style, contains lots of bizarre and often ugly takes on modern human existence, focussing especially on the hypocracies and dark motivations of a wide variety of characters. The visual style of the movie progresses from his earlier work, continuing to find new and thought-provoking viewpoints of his subjects. So far, so good. The problem for me in this movie was that it seemed to lose its way half-way through. Too many undeveloped threads (female lead for director's movie), too many broken threads (still haven't sussed the link between Betty and Diane) and maybe he didn't quite succeed in tying all the diverse threads together into one entity (a movie). I guess the Lynch-mob will lap all this up, but I found my mind wandering mid-movie, which hasn't happened for me in earlier Lynch flicks.