Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

ThrillMessage There are better movies of two hours length. I loved the actress'performance.

Jonah Abbott There's no way I can possibly love it entirely but I just think its ridiculously bad, but enjoyable at the same time.

Taha Avalos The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

gavin6942 Isabelle is an ex-nun waiting for her special mission from God. In the meantime, she is making a living writing pornography. She meets Thomas, a sweet, confused amnesiac who cannot remember that he used to be a vicious pornographer, responsible for turning his young wife, Sofia, into the world's most notorious porn queen.What I liked about this film was how it circled around pornographic topics, but was never itself obscene. The language is rarely crude, and there is either no nudity or such small amounts to be almost unnoticeable. Yet, three of the main characters are (or were) actively involved in the pornography business.I also liked the cheesy line delivery (such as the bit about "floppy disks"). I don't know if this was intentional, or something that just happened because they actresses were foreign... but it added a nice charm, I thought.

robert-temple-1 Five years after making his delightful first feature film, THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH (1989), Hal Hartley wrote and directed this rather inferior film, his fifth feature. This film certainly has excellent acting by Martin Donovan, Elina Löwensohn, and Isabelle Huppert. (Donovan is still working with Hartley, and has just appeared in Hartley's latest film NED RIFLE (2014).) But Hartley does not pull off the extremely unpleasant story about some pretty unpleasant people. He goes for comedic effects including holding shots for long enough for us to laugh (hopefully), but he overdoes it and the whole thing does not work. Nor would one necessarily want to know what happens to those people anyway. And I for one certainly did not want to laugh about it, because they are all so disgusting that it simply is not funny. The film starts off with Martin Donovan lying in an alley in New York City, apparently dead. Elina Löwensohn is scampering around his body anxiously and then runs off in fear. Donovan then wakes up and can remember nothing, not even who he is. So far, so good, a promising start to an amnesia story. But then Hartley has ludicrously created a character played by Huppert who is an ex-nun who has left her convent and engages in sex fantasies, claiming to Donovan (whom she befriends) that she is a nymphomaniac who is also a virgin. So far not so good. It is too silly, and Huppert's gloomy expressions and attempts to make her character convincing by means of enigmatic frowns are not successful. Then we discover that the unknown persona of Donovan is not Mr. Nice Guy suffering from memory loss, as we have been led to believe, but instead a Mr. Extremely Nasty who murders and maims people and is involved in prostitution rackets. Charming! So we have a violent nutter who is mixed up with a pious nutter and also with a pornography star who is also a nutter, played by the always-intriguing and alluring Löwensohn whose talents are utterly wasted here. And it is all such a waste of time. Hartley should have torn up the hopeless script and written something worthwhile, but instead he went ahead and shot the damned thing. If we are meant to see anything profound in the resulting mess, I have yet to detect it. Time to move on.

Mark L. Kahnt Maybe Isabelle Huppert rubs me the wrong way, maybe trying to do European work in an American context confused the crew and writers, maybe the cast and director realised that this just wasn't going to connect for most people, but it proved unwatchable for me. I'd try it for a while, and then go back to channel hopping. The DVD, which I bought at a liquidation store, sat in the player for three months, watching a chapter here, a chapter there, until I got into the eighth chapter. I elected to bite my tongue and watch the rest, finding myself pushed away further by acting that just did not seem to be trying or allowed to try, from actors that I have seen do much better. In the end, the player would no longer open, possibly fearing that others may have to see the movie.Much of the cinema I seek out is European, not in English, with writing and concepts of depth. I watch and enjoy art movies, great films that explore people, concepts, relations, but that is not what this was for me.It reminded me of what someone trying to live the concept of The Producers would do - irrelevant and unbelievable dialogue, a gunfight that belongs in Police Squad, and characters that are almost universally unsympathetic - except the missing persons officer who aspires to make up for all the rest. I laughed at the production that seemed to have been asking the cast to weaken their performances, a presentation that increasingly seemed like theatresports without the humour as the rendition gave up in even believing the movie would work. I'm sorry, but this is closer to Plan 9 from Outer Space and Spaceballs than it is to Kolya or L'Ennui.

cdoggy99 I kept waiting for this movie to make sense at some point, and it never happened. I looked at the IMDB rating hoping to get some kind of an idea how many people saw the film and how many people gave it a rating higher than 7. Boy was I disapointed. What a waste of celluloid!