Post-romanticism can not be, simultaneously, more beautiful and more distant than this movie. Guiguet builds a fiction linked to the literature and memory of a "fin de siecle" 's romantic classicism (being an adaptation of a novel by Thomas Mann), consisting in its reinterpretation by a critical eye: reconstruction that keeps the "pathos" through signs and signals, such as the musical outbursts. Rapture's ruptures.
Des dialogues par trop littéraires qui risquent parfois de dérouter le spectateur de ce film souvent austère, mais malgré tout intéressant...
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Before you can decide that it is definitely a poseur orgy and sentimental drivel, it strikes you as a fairy tale for adults, sweeps you into its simplified romanticism and drives you to have thoughts about sincerity of postmodernism (which are usually very disconcerting; but here these are redeemed by what would be considered as a spoiler).