16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good movie, but a discredit to the DVD medium, December 28, 1999
By A Customer
The movie itself is quite good, but what they don't tell you is that the original Spanish dialogue has been eliminated in favor of an unforgivable English dubbing. What's more is that there are no alternate soundtracks available on this DVD, and no subtitles to choose from. In other words, it's a low budget insult to the DVD medium where all these things are not just possible, but expected. I would love to see this movie in its original language before it was butchered, because there's some good film-making going on here.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Spanish tragedy., March 27, 2005
I saw this film in Spanish-language VHS format with English subtitles. My experience with dubbed foreign films has been uniformly bad, and I avoid them like the plague. Dubbing ALWAYS makes a film worse, without exception, and no matter what the language.
I enjoy Saura's Flamenco films, and so was curious about what a Saura "action" film would look like. The fact that Antonio Banderas appears in it was a side issue for me. It was made before he made the Hollywood big-time, and was still trying to be a serious actor. He is actually quite good as the idealistic but jaded young newspaperman.
It is a curious film, not what I expected. Although it was made in 1997, and has televisions, computers, and cell phones in it, it reminded me of the bleak French and Italian films of the '40's and '50's, after WWII, before Europe became prosperous again. It has a distinctly unmodern, pessimistic atmosphere. The setting of the circus, and the character of a trick rider recall the 19th century. Anna, the rider/shooter, is clearly not at home in the contemporary world, seems to be caught in a time warp, and lives according to her own, pre-modern rules. The circus life has much in common with the gypsy life portrayed in Saura's flamenco films, and much of the flamenco "duende". (Note: The character Anna is the daughter of circus people, trapeze artists, from Bolzano, in the Alto Adige region of northern Italy, which accounts for her German surname. She is joking with Marcos when she says her mother was a Russian countess. Anna speaks Spanish with an Italian accent.)
The story is a revenge tragedy, a very old dramatic form, in a modern setting. But Saura, perhaps because he is Spanish, and has submerged himself in pre-modern gypsy culture, manages to avoid modern cliches while using this ancient form.
Her brief love affair with Marcos, the young reporter, is interrupted when she is raped by three young thugs, in one of the most brutally filmed scenes I have ever seen. Saura doesn't clean it up at all. You really want her to kill these vermin afterward.
A woman of Anna's accomplishments and character clearly isn't going to rest until her assailants have been punished. But this is a tragedy, not really an "action" film after all. Her killings of the rapist thugs are convincing in their ugliness, but her revenge is not sweet. It only makes her position more desperate, speeding her inexorable descent into hell. In the end, Saura makes us believe that Anna, guilty as she is, had her reasons, and that her death frees her of her sins.
The melancholy music adds to the bitter-sweet mood of the film.
The acting by Banderas and Neri is first rate. One believes that they are desperately in love, and that it would have ended badly regardless. In spite of the brutality, it is a romantic film, in the 19th century sense of the term.
It looks to me as though Neri did much of her own riding and shooting. The cinematography is quite good, Italianate, and Madrid has the look of a city lived in, not a movie set.
To make a DVD of a film like this in dubbed English only is complete philistinism, verging on the criminal.
Highly recommended in its original Spanish-language form. Even if you speak only a little Spanish, you will realize that the subtitles, even though they are pretty good, don't capture the profanity. There's no point watching it dubbed in English.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
