RyothChatty ridiculous rating

Hayden Kane There is, somehow, an interesting story here, as well as some good acting. There are also some good scenes

Sanjeev Waters A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

frankgaipa No character isn't tinged with cliché. Maybe we don't like them, maybe we do like this one or that, but so what? Even the film within a film within, ultimately, a film-in-the-making is clichéd. Or maybe such Chinese boxes have become their own genre. But if you're lucky enough to own the disk, or to hang onto a rental long enough, watch it once just for the edits, the cuts. Early on, in and around the country house, they're so frequent and abrupt they should be dizzying, but they aren't. They're always natural, true either psychologically or mechanically. The camera skips indoors and out almost, though maybe not quite, to the point where you could sketch the layout. An uncertain eye becomes a firm hand. The target of a gaze suddenly becomes the new point of view. Or someone walks into the inanimate focus of a gaze, so cut to somewhere unexpected, this new person's gaze. Point of view shifts so often, so seamlessly, it seems almost to justify me in an argument I not sure I didn't lose once about the viability of film against prose in conveying emotional detail. How difficult is it to shift point of view half a dozen times on a page or even six without degrading the game? When the whole structure threatens to replay itself toward the finish, it doesn't quite because Julien's chosen a perhaps not very French but not so unlike recent Rohmer sound-stage version of the country house. The cuts still dance, but it's a broken, postmodern dance. The actors, all I think but Julien who's out to direct and Simon, who stumbles about hilariously humbled by the shadow of too calm, too mirror-image Michel Piccoli playing him, move like too-smooth marionettes.In the end, the film is about the contrast between the opening mise en scène and the closing. It's a glorious suspense film, with no resolution to the question it asks. Can Julien pull it off? I can't recall a more completely realized Miller film.

MartinHafer This story is derived from a story by Chekov (not the Star Trek one, by the way) and the movie was very, very, very "talky". And while the quality of the film's production is there (this is why it earns a 5--for acting, direction and cinematography that are just fine), the story itself just seemed dull and lethargic. Plus, I found I really didn't like anyone--the title character seemed like a direction-less nymph, her boyfriend an insufferable "artist" who just needed to grow up, and the rest of the family just seemed like a bunch of phonies I felt no connection to in any way. And everyone just seemed to talk and talk and argue and then talk again! About the only thing going for this film to lift if above mediocrity is the very nude body of the title character in the first minutes of the film--this was tough not to notice (and this makes this movie inappropriate for kids, as well).

noralee "La Petite Lili" is a delightful, visually enticing reinterpretation of Chekhov's "The Seagull" through a very Gallic sensibility, similar to how "Clueless" updated and Americanized Austen's "Emma."While retaining most of the original dialogue and plot as a droll commentary on the more things change the more they stay the same, co-writer/director Claude Miller cleverly updates the artistic medium of debate from literature to film and uses his visual powers to very sensually illustrate the sub-text that in most productions is stifled under 19th century Russian costumes. Because for all the high falultin' talk of aesthetics and generational conflict, and intellectual art vs. commercial pandering, lust is the primary motivator. Essentially, all the men are led around by their genitals and the women are empowered by controlling them (and it was suspenseful as to which of the competing women would succeed at it for the long run as to whether any of the men could remain faithful to them). For all their intellectual pretensions, all the characters are ruled by their emotions. Miller wonderfully sets us up for the hot indolence of a country home weekend with a nude nubile Ludivine Sagnier, triggering a much more more effective mise en scene than Bernardo Bertolucci did in "Stealing Beauty." The effect Sagnier has on all the gathered extended family members is palpable and her brazen manipulations are consistent through to the ironic conclusion. I thought through most of the movie that the director was possibly unaware of just how equally visually mesmerizing her counterpart Robinson Stévenin is on screen, as only one character responds to him, until I saw that James Dean is thanked in the acknowledgments and realized that Miller was using this brooding hunk as an archetype as well (his one final smile is almost a shock). The last act is a culminating commentary on Chekhov's jarring denouement, claiming that "this is how it should have turned out." Miller softens some of the punishing sexism of the original while putting together a film-within-a-film like Hamlet's play-within-a-play that revenges on the ex-girlfriend, the mother, the mother's lover, etc. full of both comedy and tension. The sub-titles are many times white on white for difficult reading.

RNQ Did Chekhov actually have confidence his scenes of unresolved moments would become immortal, such that, for example, in Claude Miller's La petite Lili, The Seagull gets reprised three times or so. The transposition of the amateurism of the original play within the play to a youthful video and then to an elaborate film production is very amusing. And it work nicely to make the original Russians a genially observed group of film business people on holiday in Brittany. In the story of La petite Lili young Emilie Marcucci charms everybody she meets, as Ludivine Sagnier does the viewers of this film. She's a marvel, and the rest of the move is fine too.