Women, get your handkerchiefs out!

Rating: Null/10 (20 January 2007)

A flawed masterpiece wanna-be. David Lean is the past, long live Minghella. Or something like that. Or not. The movie's strong point is that it remains interesting in spite of its length, even though there are some moments of tedium around the middle. The fact that the movie isn't too dull makes up for its weaknesses.
The movie's weakest point is the casting of the doomed lovers. Scott Thomas and Fiennes have no chemistry going. He is as cold and distant as ever; he can't help it - that aloof English exterior is his trademark, whether he likes it or not. But the bigger problem is Thomas. She is far too unattractive to play the part, and when she takes her clothes off we are shocked to see that her body is in even worse shape than her face. She is a mess. A movie of such ambition and scope HAS to have a stunningly beautiful, charismatic leading lady, and a passionate, charismatic leading man. Just picture this movie with Gable and de Havilland. Or, since it's a 90s movie and the choice for such a film is slim, how about McGregor and Collette. Or Pitt andÂ… Oh, hell, almost ANY actress is better-looking than Thomas! I'll never understand why Minghella chose to show Thomas entirely nude, while we get only brief glimpses of the far better-looking (which isn't saying much), better built Binoche. The worst thing about it all is that Thomas is sold to the viewer as some kind of beauty. Well, you have to be gay, mad or blind to buy into that.
The story is well-constructed, but contains an incredibly stupid plot-device: the allies arresting Fiennes - who has a British accent - just because his name is unusual is very dumb and unconvincing, indeed. It wouldn't matter so much were it not crucial to the tragic outcome. Minghella had to think of a way why Fiennes would betray his country in order to save his girl, but he couldn't think of anything good so he came up with this nonsense. I also think that he overdid it with the predictable tragedies; it is okay to have one suicide in a movie, but two?? One guy kills himself after finding out about Fiennes's betrayal. The other guy, Firth, dives like a kamikaze pilot into Fiennes. It's all just a bit much. The same can be said of the surprising vertical-sex scene; I am used to Michael Douglas screwing his female co-stars on the wall or furniture, but to have non-horizontal sex of this kind in a wanna-be Lean movie is too much.
I don't understand why Thomas attacks Fiennes when she appears in his suite just before they bonk for the first(?) time. And I was not at all impressed by that scene where the Indian entertains Binoche with some rope-fresco-spotting nonsense: that kind of pretentious stuff is right out of one of those dull "arty" European movies.