The results are almost impossible to credibly swallow – one minute Esteban is trying to kill Antonio Banderas, the next he is trying to smuggle Banderas out of the country. The first half puts incredible emotion and dramatic conviction into detailing the man’s cruelty but the second half gets sentimental and pushes the character’s cruelty under the carpet, granting him maudlin forgiveness. Unfortunately, the second half of the film almost entirely mitigates the character. Clara (Meryl Streep) and Esteban Trueba (Jeremy Irons)
It is a beautifully written and acted piece of characterisation. Jeremy Irons, despite appearing to be talking through an ill-fitting set of dentures, gives a performance of cruel power and all-too-believable tyranny that dominates the entire film. It falls into two stories – the first and most interesting being the study of Esteban’s rise to power and of his cruelty and hypocrisy the second and less interesting (and less convincing), the romantic story of two lovers set against the background of the revolution. The book is certainly a mammoth effort to try and pull off as a single film. Exactly what is fiction and what is not is hard to tell – the film, for instance, never specifies which South American country the story takes place in. On the other hand, there is also something undeniably fictional to the story’s multi-generational romantic saga, told as it is in the Latino style of Magical Realism, featuring the likes of a precognitive Meryl Streep and appearances from various ghosts. There are many aspects of The House of the Spirits that can be seen as autobiographical on Allende’s part. Isabel was a niece of Chile’s President Salvador Allende whose socialist government was overthrown in a CIA-backed military junta by General Pinochet in 1973. There is something undeniably autobiographical to Isabel Allende’s novel The House of the Spirits (1982), which this film is based on.
0 kommentar(er)
