A Kiss Before Dying
Like a faint melody playing in the distance, Thomas Vinterberg's bizarre It's All About Love lacks clarity—but one strains to hear it. Enduring this dystopian movie, starring Claire Danes and Joaquin Phoenix, is a chore. With a plot as coherent as a foreign taxi driver, and the dialogue to match, the low-budget Strand Releasing picture borders on gibberish.
Something about the way it's made—with Zbigniew Preisner's haunting music, Ben Van Os' production design, Vinterberg's script, written with Mogens Rukov—is strangely involving, like some cab driver yammering away in something other than English with an intensity that transcends language.
It doesn't work, but it makes you want it to. Taking it in means watching Phoenix and Danes as lovers in a dangerous time—the future—scurrying around Manhattan as people drop dead in the streets, trying to escape some inexplicable darkness enveloping the world. As a separated married couple that reconcile in the face of the apocalypse—the nature of which is left purposely vague—we know their chances aren't very good.
Danes plays a top Polish ice skater whose family may have enmeshed her in a sinister conspiracy. Phoenix, playing her husband, enters the picture in New York, showing up to sign divorce papers only to smell a rat and come to her rescue. Neither partner knows what it is that threatens her or the world—several scenes suggest a causeless global catastrophe—and It's All About Love is not making a political statement; like many of today's wartime movies, the mayhem is meant to convey a general sense of impending doom.
Danes and Phoenix suffer major accent lapses and the aimless plot grows burdensome. As Phoenix's brother, Sean Penn serves as a narrator who's flying around the globe on jet planes and, though he sounds like a rabbi, his character gives the artsy It's All About Love an eerie, powerful ending that cashes in on the script's poetic elements. Preisner's operatic score is mesmerizing.
Cold like Gattaca, strange and talky like Closetland, with traces of an end-of-the-world theme that evokes Nevil Shute's On the Beach (not the movie), It's All About Love lacks the plot to be all about anything. But there's a hymn to love in here somewhere, buried too deep to make it truly worthwhile, and Danish co-writer and director Vinterberg's decision to indulge his vision has its rewards.
Something about the way it's made—with Zbigniew Preisner's haunting music, Ben Van Os' production design, Vinterberg's script, written with Mogens Rukov—is strangely involving, like some cab driver yammering away in something other than English with an intensity that transcends language.
It doesn't work, but it makes you want it to. Taking it in means watching Phoenix and Danes as lovers in a dangerous time—the future—scurrying around Manhattan as people drop dead in the streets, trying to escape some inexplicable darkness enveloping the world. As a separated married couple that reconcile in the face of the apocalypse—the nature of which is left purposely vague—we know their chances aren't very good.
Danes plays a top Polish ice skater whose family may have enmeshed her in a sinister conspiracy. Phoenix, playing her husband, enters the picture in New York, showing up to sign divorce papers only to smell a rat and come to her rescue. Neither partner knows what it is that threatens her or the world—several scenes suggest a causeless global catastrophe—and It's All About Love is not making a political statement; like many of today's wartime movies, the mayhem is meant to convey a general sense of impending doom.
Danes and Phoenix suffer major accent lapses and the aimless plot grows burdensome. As Phoenix's brother, Sean Penn serves as a narrator who's flying around the globe on jet planes and, though he sounds like a rabbi, his character gives the artsy It's All About Love an eerie, powerful ending that cashes in on the script's poetic elements. Preisner's operatic score is mesmerizing.
Cold like Gattaca, strange and talky like Closetland, with traces of an end-of-the-world theme that evokes Nevil Shute's On the Beach (not the movie), It's All About Love lacks the plot to be all about anything. But there's a hymn to love in here somewhere, buried too deep to make it truly worthwhile, and Danish co-writer and director Vinterberg's decision to indulge his vision has its rewards.
