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I was really looking forward to seeing this probably due to Adrien Brody being in it and the fact that brutalism is really close to my heart as regards architecture.

It starts fairly well actually no it doesn't it starts appallingly badly for the first five minutes and I thought oh Jesus what is this? And then it starts to settle down and the annoying music on top of the voices speaking Hungarian with subtitle go away and we have a film we can follow without having to be Olympic level multitaskers.

And for the first hour hour and a half it is quite good.

And then the wife and the niece turn up and the film turns to Doodoo doggy Doodoo

Simply does not work after that. The direction is appalling. Some scenes at times make no sense or flip about one way then the other and you don't really know what you're looking at anymore it seems rudderless at some point even it starts to look like some kind of English stately home movie like Brideshead Revisited but set in America, not at all in keeping with what the story is meant to be about.

Linguistically the Hungarian bits done by Adrien Brody sound okay I do not personally know Hungarian but it sounds like plausible hungarian but then the two actresses turn up From supposedly Hungary and it becomes a very English English vibe and no sense of central European anything in there.

Overall very disappointing I do not see why it got given prizes again you have to look at the promotion here of the Zionist agenda and the fact that show a couple of synagogues and we all have to clap and there is the line "they do not want us here" boohoo ... I think that is termed a jeremiad and mars the opus even more

Not quite sure but some people remarked on that that it was a bit of a promotion movie for the poor huddled Semitic masses having moved away from Europe to the land of milk and honey... and getting the rough end of the stick blahblahblah

Overall very very poor I will give this a three for the first hour of the movie the rest of it is undiluted swill; the scene in the tunnel in Italy wtaf??

Adrien Brody must be quite disappointed to have been tricked into doing this film wasting his talent here with lightweights; although must say Guy Pearce was truly excellent here ...

Oh man and then it goes downhill even more and then more .... gay me-too towards the end to spice up the ridicule and then a long diatribe about the camps .... so all the time we realize it was really an infomercial for the Middle-eastern state that cannot be mentioned ... heavy and relentless .... film is under fully false pretenses oh yes and an inverted Christian cross too at some point for good measure ... why not ?

Back when it came out in 1988, this was really, really loved by all right-thinking people all over the Western world.

Here was a man who showed us how terrible it was behind the Iron Curtain.

And yes, we all love to hear the guys on the street in 1968 after the Soviet invasion, the tanks on the streets of Prague shouting Dubsek and Svoboda.

This is really, really good.

And the footage in the film taken from television reels from the time is really, really amazing.

But when all the dust has settled and the historical reminiscences have disappeared or faded into the background, we are left with a story about what is in effect a masterclass in machism.

A masterclass in entitlement of the man over the woman.

In this case of the main character here, of women, which he basically uses as one would Kleenex.

Unbelievable stuff.

It just shows how much the world has changed between 1988 and 2025.

This is practically unwatchable now.

I have no idea whether Milan Kundera was the main character here or Tomas just a purely fictional character.

But it does seem that a man who writes about this kind of thing would probably have put a bit of it, a bit of himself into that story.

Anyway, we still love the fact that the film goes on for so long, three hours or something.

That is quite good.

And the filmmaker here, Philip Kaufman, was also notable around the same time for this incredible film called The Right Stuff (1983) about the space programme.

So the film is really of very high quality.

What is totally unpalatable are the values displayed here and the absolutely atomic machismo displayed by the main character, Tomas, played by Daniel Day-Lewis ; an actor we feel probably would not be a million miles removed from the character depicted here, as is often the case with actors. Like attracts like is one of the universal laws.

Anyway, watch it at your peril in 2025.

You might still enjoy it.

If you are under the age of 40, I think you probably will not.

If you are over the age of 40 and saw it back in the day, well, you will see probably what I saw, which is a world we no longer want back.

This is quite interesting in the way in which both of these actors middle-aged man here François Damiens and a much younger woman Salomé Dewaels playing his daughter in this film come across as extremely gifted both of them it is kind of one of those films where it's a film about making a film which can be quite an annoying medium America has produced many of those types of films over the years and some European movies have also done that but quite frankly even though they are doing that here it does not have the annoying dimension that you sometimes find about thespians talking about thespians letting the the viewer know how difficult it is for them to be thespians

What we see here is a father trying to rekindle a relationship with his daughter whom he has abandoned years ago together with his wife the mother of the daughter at first she is reluctant obviously since she thinks he's going to be here just for a day or two and then go away again but he now has a strong type of cancer and therefore actually means business this time

There is a sort of parallel universe interplay kind of different outcomes shown one after the other like a dream sequence or maybe what could have happened and that kind of thing which is a bit disorientating at times but ultimately it comes together pretty well

• Although it mentioned The Marquesas Islands in the title a place where Brel liked to be we do not go there we are stuck between Brussels and

Brittany in this film between an oyster farm a nice cottage near the coast and the streets of Brussels

• It is really quite an odd movie with its own very unique flavor again held together by two sterling performances; bittersweet quite sad at times but ultimately leaves you with a nice feeling.