It's no wonder that the film's budget was nearly $11 million. "A Promise" is truly gorgeously shot.
It's equally no surprise that the US box-office take was less than $1 million. I don't know at whose feet to lay the blame for this soporific set-piece: casting? direction? I do know that this is a love story without much in the way of romantic feeling. Perhaps a boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl plot is way too predictable these days, but there was so little spark, particularly from the younger of the two male leads, that I did not even root for the typical outcome.
It was clever, I suppose, to substitute "British" class-based accents for a story set in Germany to distinguish characters' social classes from one another. (How would the average viewer know a higher-class German-accented English versus a lower-class one?) And there were certainly other competent directorial decisions. There may have also been an anachronism or two, however, including a clunky scene near the end alluding to the rise of Nazism, but the timing wasn't completely clear (right after the war? early 1920s?), so I'll give M. Leconte a pass on that.
May the great Alan Rickman, a highlight of this production, rest in peace.
It's equally no surprise that the US box-office take was less than $1 million. I don't know at whose feet to lay the blame for this soporific set-piece: casting? direction? I do know that this is a love story without much in the way of romantic feeling. Perhaps a boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl plot is way too predictable these days, but there was so little spark, particularly from the younger of the two male leads, that I did not even root for the typical outcome.
It was clever, I suppose, to substitute "British" class-based accents for a story set in Germany to distinguish characters' social classes from one another. (How would the average viewer know a higher-class German-accented English versus a lower-class one?) And there were certainly other competent directorial decisions. There may have also been an anachronism or two, however, including a clunky scene near the end alluding to the rise of Nazism, but the timing wasn't completely clear (right after the war? early 1920s?), so I'll give M. Leconte a pass on that.
May the great Alan Rickman, a highlight of this production, rest in peace.