penseur
Joined Aug 1999
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penseur's rating
Despite the "Swedish" in the retitling for the American market, this film is set entirely in Denmark. Birte Tove, one of Denmark's two "first ladies" of mainstream erotic cinema of the 1970s, stars in her first feature as Christa, a miniskirted air hostess who takes men she meets on flights to bed in her Copenhagen apartment (shared with other girls) in a search for Mr Right. The story is filled out by her having split with her husband and father of her child, who isn't too happy about it. We get to see Christa, a petite pretty blonde, in various stages of undress, including nude on the beach (but pubic areas are discretely hidden). Apart from Copenhagen we get to see a bit of the countryside with a fast sports car and Denmark's tourist attractions of the Himmelbjerg "mountain", the white Møns Klint cliffs plus of course a porn shop. It is all fairly tame but presents the zeitgeist of the time quite well.
Firstly a plea to location scouts - the exterior of London's Swiss Re a.k.a. "Gherkin" building is already a cliché - if you don't want audiences to groan, choose something else to represent the City of London from now on. Author Peter Mayle's love affair with the gorgeous Provence countryside is well known and the best thing about this movie is Ridley Scott's filming of it. As for everything else - the deepest thing that will be experienced in this movie is the dry swimming pool into which Russell Crowe's character falls. For the first 40 minutes or so Scott attempts to compensate for the thin script by slapstick and boorish behaviour on the part of Crowe, but it doesn't succeed. For the rest of the film the attempt is made by putting the two beautiful actresses Marion Cotillard and Abbie Cornish to the fore, but so unconvincingly that it doesn't work either. A film that probably sounded good in theory, but conceived and executed badly.
It was inevitable that - like the Stan Graham saga of 1941 made into the movie "Bad Blood" - the Aramoana massacre of 1990 would eventually be turned into a feature film. To their credit, the cast and crew of this have done a good job of it and perhaps just as importantly, the script writers have attempted to provide a little insight into why it happened, although the full background is something that people will need to read the two books that were written about it to get. The film starts in the morning of the day it started (the events lasted into the next day) and continues - with only a couple of brief flashbacks on the part of Gray - till a conclusion just after Gray is shot dead by police. It manages to keep fairly true with the actual events (as described in the two books) although there are some departures of varying importance. The film works well as a drama and unlike a Hollywood movie doesn't portray anyone as a superhero, or thickly apply sentimentality. The cinematography is also superb.