WasAnnon
Slow pace in the most part of the movie.
TrueHello
Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.
Verity Robins
Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.
ANCHINN
not enough lines, but full of cinematic words. i can say it's a dictionary of cinematic words. it's silent but eloquence. real an intelligence. if you can't understand those words, you can' understand what Duras wanted to say. you know that's a loss of your life. blond hair-black hair, light color clothes-dark color clothes.... what do you think of that? maybe it's just a whim of the director. water-mirror. you can look in the water what reflects. do you recognize him or her? what if, you don't know someone reflects in water instead of you? what you gonna do? deny or affirm? is it really someone you don't know? listen to the radio. it's interesting. Polanski once use this method in Knife in the water. i witness in this film, that Duras moved by the several works of great Antonioni.
Charles Herold (cherold)
Two of the four reviews on this site say in essence, "I'm a fan of minimalist cinema but this is too minimalist." Well, I'm not a fan of minimalist cinema. I wanted to see this movie because Duras wrote Hiroshima Mon Amour, one of the greatest movies of all time, but within twelve minutes I had a very bad feeling. You hear a news report, two women exchange a few words, one makes a phone call, then they clean the kitchen table, slowly and thoroughly, then they go into the kitchen and clean up their, and one makes another phone call, and I'm thinking, is this really the movie? So then I read the four reviews here, two dismissive, two ecstatic (but suggesting that this is a movie where the viewer has to fill in the gaps) and I decided that life is short and 12 minutes of this movie is quite enough.
wkkbooks
Elliptical . . you are invited to project into the gaps. I find an atmosphere of unbearable tension, depression, grief, apprehension,watching two women living with some persistent post-traumatic stigma, unexplained, in a waiting that never ends. Something to do with the mother's unique, uncommunicable anguish over a very bad, violent, abnormal daughter. We never learn what she did or see her misbehave, we imagine the worst and her most innocent behavior seems unnerving, suggestive of evil. A double anguish, also having to do with a pair of depraved teenage boy killers on the loose in the neighborhood. Did they kill someone in the family? Or are they perhaps family members? Do the two women know something about these boys that the police don't? A numbed mood with its own rapturous nuances, separates them from the street world in front of the house, and the equally claustrophobic garden world in back of the house, the absolutely still house. Great actresses are denied the opportunity to act, a kind of negative violence which causes amazement and discomfort. By bizarre contrast, suddenly a radiant 24 year-old Depardieu, as an awkward vacuum cleaner salesman, gives a hilarious, virtuosic shaggy dog monologue out of Pinter or Beckett. Virtually his first film, it precedes his official filmography; what a discovery. The film goes nowhere, a fragment, a shard of smoky Durassian flint. The more Duras one already knows, the more one can appreciate this seemingly obscure and tedious film.
plix flooberhausen
First let me state that I am a huge fan of foreign cinema - have been for decades, so should you be dismayed by the comments that follow, write me off as a philistine at your own peril.I chanced upon this movie and reading the back cover notes on the DVD: 'Nathalie Granger is an elliptical, elusory story about the world of women in which dull domestic ritual masks an undercurrent of lurking violence', I thought, OK, I'll take a chance. Though the director is also credited as the writer, there is decidedly more writing in the liner notes on the DVD. 'Dull domestic ritual?' If that includes repeatedly walking trance-like in and out of rooms (though sometimes it's just the room sans a life form) for no particular reason, staring off into the distance for interminable periods of time, a lack of what humans have come to know and embrace as conversation, so much so that it could be described as monasterial, the comatose deportment of all but 1 of the 7 characters, a cavernous void where a story might reside, well, then I'd say that the description hits the nail on the head - which I suppose, would account for the undercurrent of violence. Overall, the film lacks the sort of cohesion that would bind you to the experience, and comes across as a series of scenes without narrative or resolution of any kind. While I do appreciate minimalist cinema, this takes 'elusory' to as close to infinity as is possible with celluloid. So, if you are looking to for the kind of cinematic experience that is as riveting as staring at an unpainted wall, then this is your film! Though for me, I would like my 83 minutes back, please.
