Erica Derrick
By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.
Zlatica
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
Roxie
The thing I enjoyed most about the film is the fact that it doesn't shy away from being a super-sized-cliche;
Richard Kelly
This is a great piece of work by first time film-maker, Deborah Warner. A stellar cast of film and theatre heavy weights (Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon and Fiona Shaw) star in a Chekhovian "comedy" of changing times and politics. Set among the Anglo Irish, the film is a coming of age story for its young heroine (a great performance from Keeley Hawes) who lives with her aunt and uncle (Smith and Gambon) in aristocratic insulation and isolation from the increasingly violent struggles that edge ever closer. Apart from the performances (Gambon and Shaw being particularly fine), what impresses is Deborah Warner's complete grasp of her material. Her reputation in the theatre is of a quiet, incisive intelligence that can cut to the heart of a text and present it new and clear to the audience. The evidence here is that she has a career every bit as impressive ahead of her in film: The Last September is fluent, assured and extremely watchable, with every last detail (music, design and lighting)beautifully and sympathetically realised. Wonderful.
Karnevil-2
Slow-moving and extremely melodramatic film, but still interesting. Rare in that it compares a girl's (as opposed to the more common male narratives) coming-of-age to a nation's coming-of-age.There is a certain amount of James Joyce-ian cruelty and mocking towards the Irish, Anglo-Irish, and British identities depicted in this film. The British soldiers are portrayed as silly, superficial, self-absorbed characters. Yet they are also powerful in that they have shaped the identities of both the Anglo-Irish (or pseudo-British) family, and the lower-class Irish "freedom-fighters." Once the soldiers leave to return to the front-lines, both Irish "halves" lose their purposes and identities. The director asks harshly, "Who are you and what is left of yourselves once your audience and oppressor have left?"Likewise, the coming-of-age experiences of Lois, and "the woman passing out of her prime" story of Marda (played really well by Fiona Shaw) are also critically assessed. Lois is just beginning to discover the power (sometimes dangerously misdirected) that comes with female sexuality, while Marda is experiencing the powerlessness of female aging. Again, the director makes the point that identity cannot sustain on the outside; it must come from within.*******Spoilers*******Unlike the Irish and the Anglo-Irish family, however, Lois does possess a very strong inner core of identity that remains untouched, and it is not because she is oblivious to or uninvolved with the complicated social, political, religious, and economic situations that she encounters. Her strength in knowing who she is remains steady throughout. Therefore, the fact that she leaves Ireland at the end of the film can be seen as tragic. And it's an extra dig that she leaves for America. The U.S. during the 1920s was generally regarded as place where you forgot where you came from so that you could become an "American." But had Ireland - as a country, as a nation, as a homeland - become a place where someone with so strong an identity would be left unsatisfied?
j_p_kelley
The narrative is a mess but there are many fine visuals and isolated moments of deep emotional intensity. Michael Gambon and Maggie Smith were excellent, but Jane Birkin and Fiona Shaw have some of the most powerful scenes, with their relationship problems seeming to amplify the dislocation all the characters are feeling, Irish but not Irish, English but not English. However, it is Keely Hawes' intense performance as Lois that held the movie together for me, with her coming of age, and the relationship choices she must make, personalizing the larger conflict between English and Irish that the film wants to illuminate.This is director Deborah Warner's first film (she's an experienced stage director) and I feel she relied too much on her cinematographer, Slavomir Idziak. He did a very fine job with the landscapes and interiors, but there are too many gratuitous camera tricks and heavy-handed visual cues that don't contribute anything to the story or it's impact. Overall, worth seeing for the performances and questions of national identity it raises. The interviews with Fiona Shaw and Deborah Warner on the DVD are also worth a look.
Gardiner
A great great film on many levels. As always, Maggie Smith turns in an amazing performance, as she has consistently done so throughout her career. Jane Birkin, Fiona Shaw and Michael Gambon also are wonderful to watch. The story itself is quite moving and engaging. Beautifully filmed and scored.
