Friday
10Oct2008
Movie Review - 'A Previous Engagement'
Friday, October 10, 2008 at 12:54AM | A Previous Engagement
Starring Juliet Stevenson, Daniel Stern, and Tcheky Karyo  |
Behold, the power of cheese!
There's a reason I've never read a romance novel, and I
doubt I have to spell it out for you. But I will anyway.
The bottom line is that romances in literature tend to
shake the firmament. They're either instant all-timers that you can never walk
away from (Nights in Rodanthe), or they're tragedies where love is lost
forever (Nights in Rodanthe). They don't deal with reality very well.
Movies about star-crossed lovers don't inspire much
confidence, either. They don't have any degree of plausibility to them: People
meet while walking dogs on the beach and three days later they're madly in love.
Doesn't happen. Because that's not what love is. Love can't be that.Now, that's not to say that people can't feel some innate attraction almost immediately and then it develops into love, but movies spare us the developments, which are a hell of a lot more interesting than the beginning and the end, and I can only imagine that books with Fabio grooming horses on the cover might do the same thing.
In the face of all this venom aimed at the goldmine of romantic tripe that lures in housewife after housewife, you might understandably ask, "Don't some people take Star Trek too seriously?" Yes, they do. And we laugh at them.
A Previous Engagement feels exactly like my perception of romance novels. A woman trapped in a dead-end marriage (Juliet Stevenson) remembers the summer when she fell in love with a revolutionary on the Isle of Malta, naturally. Alex (Tcheky Karyo) was French, of course, and though their love could not exist in their pasts, they both looked forward to a future together. That's right: They vowed to meet again 25 years after the fact. And if there's one thing the lust of a summer infatuation teaches us, it's how unimportant looks are a quarter-century later. Yeah.
Beyond the looks, though, there are the changes that happen to everybody. You can't even control those things that change who you are, let alone some French revolutionary you met in Malta back in the dangerous early 1980s.
To mask to obnoxious story, writer-director Joan Carr-Wiggin has weighed A Previous Engagement down with page after page of regrettable dialogue. But alas, poor writing can only hide worse writing for so long.
Nothing in this movie could ever happen, and if there's not even a starting point for a romantic fantasy, how the hell could you ever dream of the idiotic conclusion?
Bad movies are fairly commonplace. A lot of times, they're just misguided or the pieces don't match the idea. In this case, there was no hope from jump. The idea is schmaltzy, the characters derivative and bland, the dialogue unreasonably artificial, and the payoff tired and ineffective.
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