Sunday, November 20, 2011

Oh là là !

I don't know if there is anything even remotely positive to say about "Celles qui aimaient Richard Wagner", a recently released film by Jean-Louis Guillermou about... well, about Richard Wagner -- I guess.

The story conveyors are certain Judith (young) and Brigitte (aged), diehard Wagner fans, both socially rather inapt, living stuck between their own lives and the life of fantasies built on a biography of Richard Wagner [OK, it's more about Judith, but the episode with Brigitte helped highlighting the Wagnerites' weirdness... or so I understood!]

As for the horny Richard, he had a magic formula: just approach any attractive woman, whisper on her ear that she's your new muse, and she's instantly blinking with 'green lights' (oh yes, there's a background-sound from the prelude to Tristan each time he's about to knock one)... and so on... aren't you yawning already?!



100% of dialogs sound annoyingly artificial [Aaah Richard! Je vous appartiens!], and occasionally unintentionally hilarious [HE: "Vous me semblez toute chavirée ma chère!" SHE: "Ce ne sont que ces chaleurs trop vives qui m’indisposent."]

The director often lets Roberto Alagna (alias Joseph Tichatschek) act on his own, without proper guidance, and since Roberto has next-to-zero naturalness in his acting the result is very far from flattering (see a tiny excerpt here.) Even worse is Stéphane Bern (a well known French TV/radio talk show presenter) who impersonates a spoiled but grotesque King Ludwig II.

And so, with a few decent actors and with these personalities unsuccessfully trying to do the acting job, with evidently not enough money invested in the project to back the director's ambitions (costumes and makeup from a second rate theater), in addition to the impossible dialogs, somewhere half-way through the movie you start doubting if the whole thing isn't just a big fat parody. Then you start taking it all lightly and chuckle more and more often... but soon it all becomes more serious and you realize that it's just that -- a horribly bad movie.

Below is a trailer and there are a few theaters in France and another few elsewhere in Europe where you can still catch this thing.

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