WINDOW TO PARIS
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1995 Steve Rhodes
* 1/2
WINDOW TO PARIS is a fantasy and a comedy set in St. Petersburg (Leningrad to you hard-line Bolsheviks). It starts in present-day Russia and the point is made early and often that the present conditions are the same miserable conditions as under the Communist regime. The boulevards and the alleyways are a cross between medieval Europe and the sets from Blade Runner.
The hero of the tale, played by Serguei Dontsov, is literally a pied piper of a music teacher at the local school. His fellow teachers hate him because he is not more of a capitalist like them. He objects for example when they fill his classroom with boxes of computer equipment that they have gotten a good deal on. We have many lines about how the disks hold 120MB. His second job is tuning pianos and to do that he carries a wrench type instrument that looks like a gun.
He moves into an apartment where an old woman died. He makes instant friends with everyone in the apartment complex since they are major alcoholics and love to have more people to drink with. They spend the evenings getting filthy drunk. Although he is slim, tall, and sort of handsome, his friends have beer bellies the size of small whales and they are crude and unkempt. The wives look just like the husbands.
After a night of heavy drinking, they discover their window to Paris, and the fairy tale begins. Our hero meets a pretty French girl played by Agnes Soral. Most of the movie happens in Paris with periodic sojourns back to St. Petersburg.
The movie is funny at the level of watching a local amateur theater group. The scenes of our hero as a pied piper were my favorites. The movie has a fun ending in the spirit of the rest of the film. Actually, the comedy was too slow and crude to keep my interest most of the time. What I found fascinating was how depressingly awful the portrayal of modern day Russia was.
Although there was nothing outstandingly good about the movie, there was one negative standout--the camerawork. In Camcorder 101 class we learn to go easy on zooms or your audience will hate you. Worst of all are lots of very fast zoom outs to a wide-angle. The camera operator had clearly never been to any class.
WINDOW TO PARIS runs about right at 1:31. It is in Russian and French with English subtitles. The movie is rated PG-13 for a one second nude scene and for some profanity. It would be fine for any kid over 10. I do not recommend the show although it does have several nice moments, and I award it * 1/2.
Opinions expressed are solely mine & not meant to reflect my employer's.
.
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews