Not your usual sort of movie, it is interesting to think that had it been more successful, this might have been a pioneer of a whole new genre. Not quite documentary but not much of a drama, either, it derives from a venerable form of literature, the dialog, where ideas are expressed by having essentially allegorical characters discuss the subject matter. This movie takes this to the next level, by having the receiving characters, a politician and a poet, trying to translate the scientific ideas expressed by a physicist into something they might use in their own lives. Unfortunately, it was not taken far enough, to the point where there is enough dramatic content to rope in the audience and deliver an emotional experience, the normal goal of any movie.
Lacking the distinct dramatic direction typical of movies in general, it is only mildly interesting. While Liv Ullman is remarkably believable as the essentially screechy scientist she portrays here (if you have known such people), and Sam Waterston, who is evidently supposed to be one of the "seven dwarfs" (or were there eight, after all?) of the Democratic Party in the 1988 US presidential election cycle, is well-cast as a fairly stereotype Hollywood fantasy politician (an idealist caught up by a reality, a figure vastly more common on screen than in any hall of real-life government you'll ever see), there is no compelling drama that arises from their interaction, and neither does the ex-patriot political-speechwriter-turned-poet-now-living-in-Paris (a pure writer's fantasy, surely) produce it, either. While the actors definitely do a creditable job of portraying ordinary people you may encounter in real life (even at these rarefied levels of ordinariness), probably the main problem here is that they are TOO ordinary, so realistic that they lack any larger-than-life quality at all (it's no wonder Waterston's character didn't get the presidential nomination), and ultimately fail as compelling dramatic portrayals. They don't even develop any particularly good chemistry between them as people, which might easily have saved this effort on an emotional level. Instead, probably the most dramatic thing about them is that all three are on the emotional rocks at this stage of their lives, stuck at depressed dead-ends at least for the moment, and this conversation they share here doesn't change that; it's just an intellectually-oriented conversation between people who meet as strangers and part only as acquaintances, each with enough ego to not necessarily be overwhelmed by the others' ideas, or to act on them, an experience far too common in life among thinking people to be at all remarkable. Moreover, the ideas expressed would be more effectively related in writing or even in conventional documentary narrative format than by the dilute dramatic format adopted here. In lieu of a palpable dramatic thread connecting all this together, the thing which might have made it successful as a movie, it seems like a collection of disconnected ideas that might be very true-to-life in many ways, but not a story such as one tells for entertainment in the normal sense of storytelling.
Likewise, the choice of setting is never particularly woven into the theme or the presentation, either. In fact, after making a five-hour drive from Paris to be at the famed isle of Mont Saint-Michel, Waterston can't ever seem to find anything else to say about it except to repeatedly remind everybody that it is medieval, using a tone not entirely devoid of ridicule, as though the location were silly in its irrelevance to modern life (a sentiment which seems to be echoed by Liv Ullman's college-aged daughter). For all that, the movie could just as easily have been set in Yellowstone National Park, or the Grand Canyon, or a Polynesian island -- or any bar on any airport concourse anywhere in the world in between changing flights. The various shots of the island's attractions are generally just incidental, without any especially impressive photography, and worse still, the editing plays fast and loose with the locations. A wholly fictitious clock tower is inserted into the abbey church that forms the centerpiece of the island monument (although there is one way, way down below in the village chapel located elsewhere on the island) as well as a nonexistent organ (ignoring the actual pipe organ in the main church). In another instance, a single sentence in a Liv Ullman speech is actually delivered in two completely disparate great halls before she gets to the period, and in another what is supposed to be the characters leaving her house actually shows them leaving the courtyard of the "Museo Historique" (not to mention that it doesn't resemble the purported entrance they used to get in originally). Elsewhere Sam Waterston and his poet pal are shown going into the abbey church through a door that is certainly NOT the door of the abbey church (as anybody with Google Earth can verify on their home computer). A cynical person might easily conclude that the only reason the movie was shot where it was was to get the producers an all-expense-paid trip to one of civilization's greatest landmarks on their investors' nickle.
In sum, if you are interested in "systems theory", or any other discussions of deficiencies in thinking in the contemporary world, there are surely more effective vehicles that will do the subject matter more justice with more comprehension and in less time, for the quantity of content dispensed. To anybody genuinely familiar with western democracy, Sam Waterston's conundrums about government will seem not only unoriginal, but trite. And if you are watching this to see Le Mont Saint-Michel, it is not particularly better than any number of tourist-oriented videos available on-line, and is much longer and more tedious than the longest of those. And for "intellectual conversation format" drama, Steve Allen (the comedian!) did a better job in his short-lived 1970's PBS series MEETING OF MINDS, because unlike here he never forgot that effective drama actually has to have some drama in it.
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