Oscar must be rolling in his grave

rowmorg

The film is addled by insincerity. It bears as much resemblance to biting social comment as warmed-over baked beans.

Written in an age of hypocrisy and female subservience, it was once a satire with bite. Transformed to a fascist dictatorship, it is a costume comedy with false teeth.

The director is clearly out of touch with reality. For example, the chief gossip's niece keeps spying on people with a pair of binoculars that she looks through with spectacles on: something that is quite impossible.

Equally implausible is the entire premise of the picture: that a husband would pay off his wife's errant mother and thereby get mistaken for an adulterer. By the 1930s a husband could tell his American wife about her parentage without risk of the young creature experiencing a fit of the vapours or worse.

Why, when so many tens of thousands apply, does the movie industry select the most talentless of actresses? Scarlett Johanssen has so little natural ability that when the director tells her to wriggle her feet in anticipation as she opens her present (a fan --- in 1930?) she moves them up and down so slowly she could be labouring at a treadle.

All her movements, gestures, spoken lines, are evidently performed to instructions, like a performing seal. When confronted with an actor with some brio and style like Stephen Campbell Moore (ugh, three names again) Johannsen looks like a waxwork. Of course, her grotesque hair-do helps there.

It's extraordinary that international film financiers from Italy actually went along with situating a Wilde comedy rehash in Mussolini's fascist dictatorship without a single mention of the regime's existence, or of the characters' implicit endorsement of it by sojourning in Amalfi alongside the Italian fascist elite.

Even more astonishing that producers from the new Spain invested in this travesty, when they just overthrew a fascist dictator a generation ago. Of course, there's no surprise that UK producers would make this kind of error, since the whole country is overrun with parvenu capitalist morons. But one would hope better of the Italians and Spanish.

This film is not just a bad production, it was a bad idea in the first place.

score 1/10

rowmorg 9 August 2006

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1443918/