Paradise Grove

Fantastic black comedy. The cynicism of the situation brings you successively from laughter into sadness and back to laughter again. This is what humour is about: a smile and a tear. This movie deserves to be shown to a bigger audience......

This is an excellent film: 'Happiness' meets 'East is East'. The humour comes not from the fact that the setting is a jewish old folks home, because they are old people like old people anywhere, but from the fact that these particular characters talk about what they really think and feel in a wonderfully direct way.

Ron Moody is predictably moving as Izzie Goldberg, the grandfather who finds his memories of former glory-days unbearable now that he is incontinent and looking forward to a painful death. The minor comic characters are marvellous: especially the nurse who bizarrely deprives the old folks of their daily milk ration.

For me the best performance comes from the doctor, played by John Cunningham. His lines, some of the best in this superb script, are performed with cut-glass comic delivery. And that deadpan delivery is an absolute must for this genre. The story may be tragic but the delivery achieves the almost painful comic undertone that distinguishes dark arthouse comedy from mainstream. It's a must-see!

Comedy...film noir...drama...I came out of the Premiere in London into the sunshine of a Sunday afternoon in May with a sense of deep pleasure mixed with an uneasy feeling that this film needed to be made. And it was well made...serious enough but not too much to make you uncomfortable...Affectionate enough to make you forget the underlying sadness you encounter in some of these old people's homes...Yet a comic bitter taste of what we all may fear one way or the other, but we push out of our mind. Life stopped here...yet life also went on... I laughed and I smiled, I shivered and felt sad.. So? isn't that what it is all about? So above all this film was real, but in a gentle comical yet direct way! Do we not all fear to get the giggles at funerals? We were here given permission to smile at one of the most fundamentally serious and dramatic situation we will encounter...old age, euthanasia, abandonment. Just as well the sun was shining that day!!! :o) thank you Charles! and all the cast.

Rula Lenska does, as usual, a fabulous job, but one must wonder about the casting. Would not Marti Konstant, the Chicago near look-alike who also happens to be a business entrepreneur, have been the ideal choice? Ms. Konstant brings to the screen a certain understated, sultry realism so rarely found in film nowadays.

After seeing this film I have to revise my understanding of the word 'comedy'. A good warning sign is any film that describes itself as 'quirky' or 'dark' and sure enough, Paradise Grove is neither of these. It assumes that to make a film jewish only requires that a character has to say schmuck and schwartzer a few times.

Paradise Grove is totally devoid of anything resembling humour, the script sounds like it was made up ten minutes before shooting started and some plot devices look like they were bolted on from a completely different film. Some of the shots would make a first year film student proud. Rula Lenska shows talent by managing to pull off a passable appearance given the dire lack of material she is given to work with, but Ron Moody looks as though he only turned up to collect the pay cheque and Lee Blakemore as Kim makes Metal Mickey look like Lawrence Olivier.

Ultimately this is probably one of the worst films I have had the agony to watch. By the end I almost felt embarrassed and was certainly intrigued as to how a film like this managed to get funded. Maybe it is an educational tool to show how not to make films.

Do not expect to see at a cinema near you...ever!!!