Beyond "Emotion"...

Rating: 7/10 (20 June 2000)

This is a film that makes a clear effort to present some sort of "Casablanca for the nineties". It borrows the setting of the North African desert in the late 30's, a point on the distant fringe of a landscape beginning to taste the wrath of Nazi Germany. Also apparent is the forbidden attraction between a single, unattached man and a married, respectable woman.
If there is any reason why so many movies, ranging from every genre, have been set in WWII, it is found somewhere in the metaphor of the outside turmoil, devastation, death, heartbreak, etc. in the grand scheme of the war as a reflection, or rather, an allusion to the same happenings occurring the the private personal lives of the characters.
Now, this is all good and well if you are searching hard to create some sort of mood, but it was all to certain that the filmmakers relied just too heavily on the atmosphere of the setting, letting it drive the plot instead of having the film focus on the personal lives of the characters.
The overall effect of the film is that is seems just too calculated, it reaches into a familiar routine that you may notice in many of the so called "tear-jerker" movies. A horrible death here, a shocking suicide there, a forbidden this, an unabashedly sexual that. And so on. Watching the film, I felt bombarded by these various tricks and tactics that are used to make me "feel", to "get emotionally involved".
Of course, I am human, and consequentially I will fall prey to this and feel "touched" at various points in the film. But nonetheless the film lacks that certain, indescribable something that defines the great classic films, including 'Casablanca'. It is some sort of spontaneity in the acting, something uplifting, a performance, perhaps even one line, that sums up the world into the vision of the characters, that makes us believe in them. Something real. Something that produces more than just "emotion", but rather wonder (a word that needs no quotation marks).
Isn't that what real romance is about?