I'd enlighten you but I'm afraid that's just going to turn you into a hater :-) For the standards of the modern film making this film is pretty much worth nothing. It's fractured, diluted, doesn't have the flow, doesn't build up anything even resembling a momentum and then as an insult to injury the "musical" numbers are total miss. Cinematography is sub-par as well. Plain and simple, an amateur hour job.
The attempt at incorporating documentary footage failed miserably and just reminded me how "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" managed to incorporate some footage from the Czech uprising much better. In part because Kaufman was very restrained and also directed a few scenes to look like they were at the event, thereby blending it in. Kovacevic in comparison seems obsessed with the raw footage, allows it to run for way too long and makes no real attempt to blend it in.
The script itself is not much to brag about either. It does have the coarse grained structure but that's the only positive thing one can say about it. The rest is as fractured as the film itself and to make things worse it breaks the fundamental rule of motion picture dramaturgy (don't tell - show) a few times. Probably because the writer/director came from a lifetime of live theater work where some rules are different.
The casting was 50-50. The lead actor was good, 2nd lead was lukewarm, female support wasn't particularly convincing. There were like 2 reasonably good episodic roles and the rest was just ridiculous.
Last but not least, I managed to see the original "Professional" (TV 1990) which worked much better and was strong and coherent because it was essentially just the filming of a a theatrical play so once you accepted that it was a play and not a movie it was able to pull you in and not let you go despite the sub-par male lead or maybe because of it (a Czech-type feeble intellectual does make sense as a playwright :-). It also had a kind of timeless and placeless quality i.e. it could easily be transposed to Russia, US during the McCarthy era, Germany, even Iran and many other less known places.
Speaking of the original, I've read recently that the original has been translated and is being played in several European countries so maybe one day someone is going to do a fresh film based on it. I'd love to see Polanski giving it a try. He's the master of closed spaces.
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ItsNotJust-a-flick
11 years ago
Not that I can argue with you on many points, but in general I believe you are too obsessed with the "proper structure" of the film. What is the proper structure, by the way? According to widely accepted view of Russian formalists, the form in a piece of writing is a set of procedures which make the content. Thus, they equal the form and the content.
Modernists in literature and 'new wave' filmmakers were playing with the form to undreamed borders and thus were creating books and films with completely new content as well.
***70s - the time when even Stallone had to make a decent film***
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