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Reviews
Hotel Portofino (2022)
Believable Characterizations?
I agree with most about the beauty of the setting, the hotel, the costumes. Unless the characters were all set up with an eye to Season 2, I have to say they were not very believable. If Bella, an English woman, is strong enough and smart enough to set up a hotel in unfamiliar Italy (she speaks only a little Italian), it's not likely she would stand for the character and behavior of her unenlightened scoundrel of a husband, Cecil. And because it's obvious she loves her son dearly, she would not put up with the way Cecil treats him -- undercutting and insulting him at very turn. In both areas, Bella seems wimpy and unbelievable. She doesn't through Cecil off until the end of the season after he has knocked her to the ground in a violent smackdown in which her face is injured. And the son, although haunted by his WWI experiences and injuries, cannot find the will to resist his blackguard father's demand that he marry the girl he's picked for him. Maybe I'm just disappointed in him, but, battlescared or not, I don't believe he would have renounced the girl he really loved for one he didn't, and submit to his terrible father's wishes. The other characters are too broadly drawn -- more nuance needed! And more believability.
Luxor (2020)
Unsympathetic and Unaesthetic
We are supposed to imagine our way into the zombie-like state of the main woman character. Her trauma as a doctor in a war zone is left to us to imagine. The reason she walks around Luxor looking numb is left for us to imagine. Her past relationship with a former archeologist lover is mostly left for us to imagine. He at least, seems normally alive. Why has this woman seemingly given up on life? Most annoyingly and unaesthetically, she wears nothing but too large, colorless, mismatched baggy shirts and pants throughout the film and wears her gray-at-the-roots, whitish-on-top hair in a tightly pulled up knot on the top of her head, secured with bobby pins at the sides -- it's painfully unattractive and is worn that awful way throughout the film; the knot doesn't even come down in bed when she's finally relents and comes to life enough to have sex with her former lover. That she has undergone some sort of transformation being in Luxor amid its centuries-old history and having connected with a man she apparently once loved is shown only obscurely and mostly left for us to imagine. Could we have had a little help imagining that with perhaps her wearing an outfit with a little color that fit and her wearing her badly in need of a good stylist and colorist hair let down? Really, a most unsympathetic character and a slow slog.