Reviews

Richard Brooks was a talented and versatile director, well-versed especially in adapting literary works, concerning this I loved his movies based on Tennessee Williams' works and the movie adaptation of Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" but this time he totally missed the point about the story.

This adaptation is almost exclusively focused on the adventurous and romantic side of the novel missing out more important aspects as the characters psychology (which is rough-sketch), the critical analysis of religion and the existence of God, the reflection about the human condition, moreover it's absolutely unbalanced in terms of characters treatment, Dmitri seems to be the absolute protagonist around which revolves the story so Ivan and Alexi are reduced to supporting characters with no substance and, interestingly enough, it's just Ivan Karamazov the most important and complex character of the book (the author himself speaks through him), although The Brothers Karamazov was conceived by Dostoyevsky as a biography of Alexi Karamazov so if there's a protagonist that's just Alexi Karamazov, however the novel is choral enough it can't identify an absolute protagonist.

There's two memorable moments in the book which don't find a place in the movie, both of them involve Ivan, I'm talking of the "The Grand Inquisitor" poem and the encounter with the devil towards the end, I consider them two key passages without which The Brothers Karamazov wouldn't be so great. On the other hand I can understand why they didn't include that kind of passages in the movie, due to their verbosity I think, however The Brothers Karamazov is a verbose novel, it's an inescapable aspect which makes this novel sublime, The Brothers Karamazov is mainly a philosophical and psychological work, let it be clear, it'a a lot of things, it's a crime story, it's a love story, it's a legal thriller, but all that is absolutely marginal compared to the depth and the authenticity of the characters, it's an amazing study of human nature, well this authenticity and this depth were totally lost in the movie; the characters turn out to be stereotyped and melodramatic, except the father played by Lee J. Cobb that I liked.

Richard Basehart, who played Ivan, was definitely too old for the role, Ivan is 24 years old whereas Basehart was 44 when the movie was filmed, he looked clearly older than Yul Brynner who was supposed to be the elder brother, even if the actual age of the actors is not so important it's necessary to keep a consistency with the original characters in my opinion. Yul Brynner was decent enough as Dmitri, Dmitri himself is the character more faithful to the original, however I found Brynner good in the action sequences but a little expressionless in dramatic ones. What to say about William "J. T. Kirk" Shatner? I don't consider his performance so bad, I think his role was just poorly written, this Alexi Karamazov is just without personality.

In short I consider this adaptation a sort of "The Brothers Karamazov" for dummies, in the sense that it was totally deprived of its "cerebral" content, what remains of this monumental masterpiece is the umpteenth Hollywood's melodrama with the classic "and lived happily ever after" ending (which was totally overturned compared to the book's) in Douglas Sirk style.

If I should indicate a director who would have been able to do a great job with this story at that time I'd say Ingmar Bergman and I'd have liked to see Marlon Brando in the role of Ivan Karamazov, only two geniuses like those ones would have been able to do justice to this story, but now they're passed away as well as the time when it was still possible to make this kind of movies.

I'm a bit disappointed by this movie adaptation of Antonio Tabucchi's Sostiene Pereira (Pereira declares), an Italian modern classic novel about an old Portuguese journalist who decides to not stand watching but to intervene, in his own little way, in a difficult historic moment (the story is set in 1938, on the eve of WWII), compromising himself. It's a great story of heroism and courage. What I didn't like about the movie is the key adopted to tell the story, I find it too comic and slight compared to the importance of the matter dealt in the book, the novel's tone is serious, Mr Pereira is a dramatic character, whereas the Pereira played by Mastroianni is excessively tragicomic to my way of thinking; there's a few hilarious moments in the book but they never appear as forced as they do in the movie. In general the story's register is gloomy, however this gloominess was lost in the movie.

Nicoletta Braschi is another reason why I didn't like this movie, she's absolutely terrible in it, she drones on all her cues, she seems to be reading a shopping list all the time!

The score composed by Ennio Morricone suffers from the same misunderstanding that affects the movie in general: the interpretation key is wrong for me, this kind of musical approach would have been more fit for a comedy than for a drama, it's a sort of funny piped music with no substance, it's absolutely unable to play the dramatic sequences up. Nevertheless what's in the book you find in the movie, the message is safe but where's the spirit? where's the atmosphere? All that remains of the book is its didactic value, but I think there's much more in it.

The only sequence where I found the book spirit is that one set on the train, where Mrs Delgado (Marthe Keller) asks Pereira to not stand watching but to act in any way he can.

Marco Ferreri was one of the most original directors in Italian cinema history, his movies contend with relationship of the modern man and the society where he lives, this relationship is often described as to be alienating and claustrophobic, however they're greatly ironic movies, "easy" to watch.

Another theme so dear to Ferreri is the woman, and La Carne (The Flesh) is another movie with a freaky female figure as protagonist. The women of Marco Ferreri are not normal human beings, they're more a sort of superwomen, they're always portrayed as dangerous beings for the man and often the man is himself a victim in the hands of theirs, concerning this I remember first Ferreri's great movies: L'ape Regina (The Conjugal Bed), La Donna Scimmia (The Ape Woman) and later La Dernière Femme (The Last Woman). Even if the women of Ferreri seem to be "superhuman" and "above" the common man I think that his standpoint about the women shouldn't be intended as a woman's celebration or as a sort of tribute to women, quite another thing: on closer inspection Ferreri's outlook about women reveals a strongly misogynist conception, I think so because those female portrays are so grotesque and so devoid of humanity that you'd have difficulty to recognize a real woman in them, in short the women of Marco Ferreri are parodies, for instance in "I Love You" we witness to an event of objectification of women, there the woman is replaced by a talking key-chain, that's Ferreri on the summit of his misogyny I think.

La Carne is not one of his best movies, however it should be seen if for no other reason than Francesca Dellera, she's absolutely amazing, let me be clear, she CAN'T act but she's a sort of living "visual effect" talking about sensuality and sex appeal, she'd be able to arouse a sort of "cannibal attraction" both in men and women and it's just a cannibal love what Paolo (Sergio Castellitto) will feel about her.

Zihron Devarim is the first of a trilogy of movies (the trilogy of three cities), by Amos Gitai about three great Israeli cities: Tel-Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem. This one is dedicated to Tel-Aviv, I like it more than others of the trilogy even if Kadosh, the movie dedicated to Jerusalem, is best internationally known and the most appreciated of the whole trilogy by the criticism. I've read Yaakov Shabtai's Zihron Devarim (aka Past Continuous), the book on which the movie was based, a really difficult reading, highly depressing, written in one paragraph compared by someone to Proust's In Search of Lost Time for its importance (a little exaggerate comparison I think). The story is about a group of people who are struggling with their existential problems, they'd like to love but they can't do it, they'd like to change their life but they always stay in the same place doing the same things, they'd like to live but they're pervaded by a sense of death, they cannot do anything but to watch themselves living. An important topic of the book which didn't find a place in the movie is the intolerance and how much it can be deeply rooted in the human mind promoted by an oppressive social setting and by a some religious fervor, this intolerance is portrayed by Goldman's father, a key character in the book, which unluckily wasn't deepened enough in the movie. Another important character of the book, which was totally cut out, is uncle Lazare whose lines were assigned to Stephana, Goldman's mother, that doesn't make sense because Goldman hates his mother and he thinks she's going out of her mind (in the book he speaks to her occasionally), whereas uncle Lazare is a really balanced kind whit whom Goldman loves to discourse about philosophy and to play chess. Nevertheless I think this movie a really good adaption of a great book, reading Zihron Devarim I used to feel a sense of pain, because of the sense of hopelessness and inevitability that pervade the whole story, well the same feeling I found in the movie, in addition I liked the score very much though it's utilized too little I think.