excellent film

Rating: 9/10 (4 February 2006)

This is a marvelous film, although sometimes unbearably cruel. The two characteristic points of the film that impressed me were: 1) The effect of the unexpected. We watch a man dreaming of vengeance, and organizing it, and finally we find out that he himself is the target of a vengeance. 2) The exaltation of the feeling of love. This exaltation is hardly convincing in ordinary heterosexual love. It reminds me of the love stories of Marques, in stories like "Del amor y otros demoniosÂ…", "mis tristes putas", "Madam Butterfly" of Henry David Hwank, and "Mary's dog" of Andreas Mitsou, a Greek writer. Here we see the incestuous love sanctified, the love between a brother and sister, and the love between a father and a daughter. The pursue of vengeance is what magnifies this feeling of incestuous love, always condemned by society, which leads the girl to suicide and the man to self- mutilation in an attempt to avoid the revelation. The act of forgiveness makes the story evade the typicality of an ordinary vengeance plot.