Antonia's Line . Tucson Weekly . 04-11-96

Antonia's Line

DIRECTED BY: Marleen Gorris

REVIEWED: 04-11-96

This flick received this year's Academy Award for best foreign picture, and it has all the banal mediocrity and pre-fab pathos we've come to expect from the Academy. Antonia is an old, dying farm woman, and the plot is a Cliff Notes version of the highlights of her life, given to us swiftly but succinctly, presumably so we may experience sorrow when she dies. The film produces so many rapidly growing babies that it's hard to feel connected to any of the characters, and the plodding narration keeps us further at a distance. This is the kind of ground best covered in novels, and the filmmaker struggles without much success to make her very long story visually dynamic. The occasional jolt of magic realism just makes the whole project more derivative and embarrassing.

--Stacey Richter

Other Films by Marleen Gorris
Mrs. Dalloway

Film Vault Suggested Links
I Stand Alone
Hollow Reed
Beyond Silence

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