Comments of Victor-65 generally right, but too critical of film

Rating: 7/10 (22 September 2006)

Generally, I agree with the comments by Victor-65. But it's always hard to compress a pretty long book into a 2-hour movie. I think the producers have dealt with the essentials reasonably well. The acting of the principals, especially the reliable John Hurt as the village doctor, is excellent. And the atmosphere of a small Greek village of that era is re-created well. The Penelope Cruz character falls for the Italian while her Greek fiancé is away fighting with the partisans, not while he's still around. I stayed in Sami, on Kefallonia, where much of the film was shot, less than a year later, and it's a community still to some degree traumatized by what went on there during the war. They had many stills from the film on a big board on the waterfront, a sign of their approval and recognition of its general accuracy.