Director: András Szirtes
Original Release: 1990
Choice: My Wife's
My Overall Rating: 2 stars out of 5
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| via The Callum's Wood Notebooks |
My Wife gave this one a good sell over the course of the week, always with the impish laugh I love so dearly. After the Revolution is an experimental Hungarian film produced immediately after the fall of communism. The basic idea is highly amusing: a struggling writer labors to finish his novel and complains constantly to his cat. The story is told from the cat's point of view. Sounds quirky and charming, right? My Wife thought it would be a great way to introduce Our Girl to experimental film.
Grainy. Lots of extreme closeups. Random clips from old Soviet propaganda films. Footage from interviews of... friends? Many of the interviews are actually in English. One woman gives herself a mud bath - full frontal for that one, though not exactly sexy. Loads of sketchy language. I suppose if we'd watched the whole thing, we'd all have been experts at swearing in Hungarian. Alas, we did not. Even My Wife decided she'd had enough after a while. We switched over to Battlestar Galactica and were all much happier.
So, why a 2 and not a 1? I didn't care for it but I'm still not willing to say it's a terrible film. Experimenting is good, even if all goes kablooey.
Any movie that is from the cat's point of view can't be all bad.
ReplyDeleteNot enough of the cat, though - definitely a drawback.
DeleteSurely, you know Facets? My Wife was a devotee in her Chicago days and we recently joined their mail order rental service. That's how we came by this one.
Yes, I like Facets and go to see foreign films there live from time to time.
DeleteSounds like a lot of fun. I've never been. My Wife used to take some of their classes, too.
DeleteHa. Yeah, I think a 2's fair, balancing the fact that the cat's narrator, vs that you abandoned the movie by consensus. Poor movie. :(
ReplyDeleteDefinitely disappointing. Again, not enough cat.
DeleteUm... that's um... I don't know.
ReplyDeleteBut I probably won't bother with it.
Unless you really want to put your intellectual snob friends to the test.
Delete