Filmography
Feb. 12th, 2013 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyBel Ami
I mainly watched this because it was an adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novella, not for any other reason. I understand this Robert Pattinson chap has been quite popular pretending to be a vampire or something along those lines, but he does an awfully hammy Frenchman.
The novella clearly has some important and interesting themes to play with, in terms of poverty versus riches, what it's like to want and then have need, the petty cruelties of daily life, and indeed the malicious planning of one man to have the women he desires to hurt the men he hates. It's a fairly scheming sort of set-up and there's potential there, but you end up with Pattinson looking like a spoilt brat, and poor Uma Thurman getting terribly over-excited about grain distribution in North Africa.
Which is a bit of a shame, because the set is sumptuous and I can see why somebody wanted to try adapting this for film as a plot. It could have worked nicely. But the entanglement of the political and the sexual is just a bit too... heavy-handed for it to work too well. It's too obvious. No attempt is made to be subtle. And that's a shame, as part of the novella's original strength (I would bet) is related to its framing and its underplaying of things. But there we go. I have spent worse afternoons.
I mainly watched this because it was an adaptation of a Guy de Maupassant novella, not for any other reason. I understand this Robert Pattinson chap has been quite popular pretending to be a vampire or something along those lines, but he does an awfully hammy Frenchman.
The novella clearly has some important and interesting themes to play with, in terms of poverty versus riches, what it's like to want and then have need, the petty cruelties of daily life, and indeed the malicious planning of one man to have the women he desires to hurt the men he hates. It's a fairly scheming sort of set-up and there's potential there, but you end up with Pattinson looking like a spoilt brat, and poor Uma Thurman getting terribly over-excited about grain distribution in North Africa.
Which is a bit of a shame, because the set is sumptuous and I can see why somebody wanted to try adapting this for film as a plot. It could have worked nicely. But the entanglement of the political and the sexual is just a bit too... heavy-handed for it to work too well. It's too obvious. No attempt is made to be subtle. And that's a shame, as part of the novella's original strength (I would bet) is related to its framing and its underplaying of things. But there we go. I have spent worse afternoons.
