I Love You, I Love You Not

Sad, strange little movie stars Claire Danes as Daisy; a shy, bookish girl attending an elite private school in New York. When she's not gushing over the delectable Ethan (Jude Law), she's spending time with her Nana in the countryside reading books and listening to Nana's tales of her survival of the holocaust.

The movie tries to intertwine the themes of post and modern day anti-semitism via Nana's stories and flashback sequences with Daisy's trials and tribulations at school when knowledge of her Jewish heritage is made public.

Unfortunately, as hard as this movie tries, it never quite hits the mark. The performances from Danes and Moreau though are heartfelt, and the message is there for those who want to see it. This movie means well and attempts to educate us on one of the all time greatest blights on mankind - prejudice.

Worth a look for early performances from Jude Law, James Van Der Beek and Julia Stiles before they hit the big time.

Essentially, this movie has all the makings for..well, a better one. Claire Danes plays a quiet girl with sad eyes, and unloving parents who spends most of her time with her Grandmother. One day in english class, she reads aloud a poem written about Jude Law's character, "Ethan", who is the stereotypical jock/playboy on campus. The two get together...blah blah blah..

I won't tell you anymore except the the ending is VERY dissapointing. It's as though the movie just, ends. You don't see it coming, you feel like it should be starting to get good, and the plot holes filled up..well, they aren't, and it does. It's really quite aggrivating. Jude Law and Claire Danes performances are great, but not quite enough to push this movie onto my favourite list. But, don't let me discourage you, it's worth the rent.

Well, this is certainly a fast forward movie to be rented, with many parts that could be zapped past.

It does explore how one grows up and deals with the pains of youth, and surprisingly, it does end with a splash that isn't expected, yet makes sense in review the movie.

It's certainly worth seeing along with a field trip to the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Southern California to understand the background of the story and to get a better grasp of the complexities of emotions that many have to deal with even today.

But it isn't a movie that is very deep nor giving. The viewer is left sitting there with the ending, and yet wondering why bother as the movie does deliver fully in engrossing the viewer and placing them into another world. It is a third person movie and you are that 3rd person -- a casual observer never to really enter.

A first draft, by a child, compared to Schindler's List.

The acting was atrocious, although with Claire Danes, I have yet to see a movie I liked. Jude Law made an interesting debut, but I didn't quite understand what he was supposed to be. Danes' character was just strange, I couldn't understand the collapse in the lecture. How many times can we beat the Jews or any other race for that matter? The move mad the mistake of making the general population seem very prejudiced. I found this movie unrealistic and boring. Too many of these "discover you're heritage" movies are coming out. At least mine, "Angela's Ashes" was decent, but if you've seen them once, you've seen them all. For those of you looking to reconnect with your past, might I suggest "The Pianist"? This movie is horrible, don't waste your time.

For me this film is unsuccessful in intermingling the issue of antisemitism with the coming of age of a relatively studious young woman. On one level the Jude Law character might be only marginally deeper than his disgustingly callow friends. He is attracted by the young woman's seriousness and relatively shy affection for him but this attraction is offset by her social conservatism. The depth of any antisemitism in him or amongst his silly friends is never explored. In the end the motivation of his character, and the point of the film, elude me. An interpretation that springs to mind is that gentiles do not feel the significance of the holocaust, that they trivialise it. Part of coming of age for jewish girls is therefore that they should (or simply do) experience failed love affairs with gentiles. The fact that these affairs fail for these reasons is somehow constructively educational for the girls. I truly hope this is not intended to be the message.