"All Things Fair" has much good to offer. However, it flunks on story with a full hour dedicated to painfully slow character/plot development which focuses more on tedious trivialities than character depth. About an hour into this unnecessarily long filler-filled film the plot breaks loose when the protag, an early teen student, kisses his teacher and finds her all too receptive to his advances. From there it's in and out of the sack while dodging the teacher's husband and the advances of one of his school mates who wants to loose her virginity to him. If that weren't far fetched enough, given the boy's almost complete absence of charisma or personality, the teacher goes through a hard to swallow change of character - as we've been led to understand it - while the film grinds on with a complicating subplot having to do with a brother and WWII. When the end of this 2+ hour coming of age flick finally arrives it leaves us with a trite moral which seems to be: Don't grow up too fast as things will get complicated soon enough. "All Things Fair" may play well with film buffs into Scandinavian minimalism. However, for audiences in general, this flick is a very pretty example of too little too late. (C+)
Review of All Things Fair
