A chick flick, and not a bad one. I don't mean that as a put down, just an observation. User Ratings show a total of 674 votes, with males giving the movie a rating of 6.5 and females a rating of 7.7. The difference is probably statistically significant.
The story itself doesn't add up to much, and there are multiple holes in the plot. The holes aren't small ones either, not the kind that can be easily overlooked. One example: Camille passes out in the snow and is in the process of freezing to death in a lonely woods when a couple of campers stumble on her mostly buried body. One camper runs to call an ambulance. Cut. Peta is daydreaming at home, gets a phone call, asks, "Where?", and the next thing we know she is at the campsite, before the ambulance. Alone in the tent with her lover, Petra croons over Camille's pale face tenderly. How did this come about? The mind boggles. It takes me back to when I was an usher in the Yiddish theater in Newark. Last scene of the play: a convict is left alone on the stage, strapped into an electric chair. Who then runs into the execution room? His mother! She throws herself on the floor and sobs onto the executionee's knees. I can think of no more reason for Peta to be alone with Camille than I can for Mom to be with her strapped-in son.
By the way, just for the hell of it, what happens to Camille? She's evidently still alive at the end, though suffering from hypothermia. I know the dog survives because under the end credits we see the animal burrow out from under the snow, shake itself off, then perform various doggy gavottes on a field of ice.
Wow, Camille and Petra make a striking couple. Petra is beautiful and sexy in a conventional way, like a model. Her performance isn't bad either. It's competent enough and there is one moment when her employer asks her how she feels about leaving Camille and her face seems washed over with sorrow before she lowers it onto the guy's shoulder.
Camille could be a model too, but not an ordinary one. She looks like a cross between Anouk Aimee and Martin Short. (Maybe a founder effect in the gene pool.) Her features are sharp and angular, where Petra's are soft and pliable looking, but she is very feminine.
I can't comment on their figures. Not enough, in my opinion, is shown of them. There is hardly any nudity. And the sex scenes are all tender and loving and consist of aesthetically correct caresses of fingers across a vast expanse of unidentifiable but still succulent-looking flesh. Nobody moans or talks dirty. Well -- no movie is perfect. I can't understand why this movie received a more restricted rating than a simple R. It's really not much more than a rather sweet soapy love story.
I should mention Henry Czerny as the confused and angry boyfriend of Camille. He has been uniformly good in every movie I've seen him in. He has a distinctive actorish face that could go either way -- into reason and compassion or into the villainy that has been his usual lot.
The movie deserves plaudits for avoiding two traps, however obvious those traps are. It does not bash men and it does not bash religion. Neither potential target does anything to help the situation, not nearly as much as Pure Love does, but both do their limited best.
Plot holes and dialog solecisms ("This morning was an anomaly". Cf: "Last night was a mistake.") aside, the story is nicely presented. The director, Patricia Rozema, takes it at a deliberate pace and decorates the screen with occasional arty images or unexpected phantasmagoria. ("Arty" in a good sense.) When the circus trucks leave town at the end her camera lingers on a poster of a huge eye which may not carry much symbolic weight but effectively grabs the viewer's attention.
I wound up hoping that Camille could be revived without loss of limbs and that she and Petra would somehow make it together, although, as Petra had earlier observed, "Everything turns ordinary after a while." The main impression the movie leaves is that Toronto has some thoroughly rotten winter weather. Any lesbians who think they've got it tough ought to consider the circumstances of the Iroquois. A winter solstice in Canada -- and no De Longhi.
The story itself doesn't add up to much, and there are multiple holes in the plot. The holes aren't small ones either, not the kind that can be easily overlooked. One example: Camille passes out in the snow and is in the process of freezing to death in a lonely woods when a couple of campers stumble on her mostly buried body. One camper runs to call an ambulance. Cut. Peta is daydreaming at home, gets a phone call, asks, "Where?", and the next thing we know she is at the campsite, before the ambulance. Alone in the tent with her lover, Petra croons over Camille's pale face tenderly. How did this come about? The mind boggles. It takes me back to when I was an usher in the Yiddish theater in Newark. Last scene of the play: a convict is left alone on the stage, strapped into an electric chair. Who then runs into the execution room? His mother! She throws herself on the floor and sobs onto the executionee's knees. I can think of no more reason for Peta to be alone with Camille than I can for Mom to be with her strapped-in son.
By the way, just for the hell of it, what happens to Camille? She's evidently still alive at the end, though suffering from hypothermia. I know the dog survives because under the end credits we see the animal burrow out from under the snow, shake itself off, then perform various doggy gavottes on a field of ice.
Wow, Camille and Petra make a striking couple. Petra is beautiful and sexy in a conventional way, like a model. Her performance isn't bad either. It's competent enough and there is one moment when her employer asks her how she feels about leaving Camille and her face seems washed over with sorrow before she lowers it onto the guy's shoulder.
Camille could be a model too, but not an ordinary one. She looks like a cross between Anouk Aimee and Martin Short. (Maybe a founder effect in the gene pool.) Her features are sharp and angular, where Petra's are soft and pliable looking, but she is very feminine.
I can't comment on their figures. Not enough, in my opinion, is shown of them. There is hardly any nudity. And the sex scenes are all tender and loving and consist of aesthetically correct caresses of fingers across a vast expanse of unidentifiable but still succulent-looking flesh. Nobody moans or talks dirty. Well -- no movie is perfect. I can't understand why this movie received a more restricted rating than a simple R. It's really not much more than a rather sweet soapy love story.
I should mention Henry Czerny as the confused and angry boyfriend of Camille. He has been uniformly good in every movie I've seen him in. He has a distinctive actorish face that could go either way -- into reason and compassion or into the villainy that has been his usual lot.
The movie deserves plaudits for avoiding two traps, however obvious those traps are. It does not bash men and it does not bash religion. Neither potential target does anything to help the situation, not nearly as much as Pure Love does, but both do their limited best.
Plot holes and dialog solecisms ("This morning was an anomaly". Cf: "Last night was a mistake.") aside, the story is nicely presented. The director, Patricia Rozema, takes it at a deliberate pace and decorates the screen with occasional arty images or unexpected phantasmagoria. ("Arty" in a good sense.) When the circus trucks leave town at the end her camera lingers on a poster of a huge eye which may not carry much symbolic weight but effectively grabs the viewer's attention.
I wound up hoping that Camille could be revived without loss of limbs and that she and Petra would somehow make it together, although, as Petra had earlier observed, "Everything turns ordinary after a while." The main impression the movie leaves is that Toronto has some thoroughly rotten winter weather. Any lesbians who think they've got it tough ought to consider the circumstances of the Iroquois. A winter solstice in Canada -- and no De Longhi.