Four friends from Spain travel to Berlin to surprise a friend on his birthday. Things don't go well and tensions are revealed.
This tedious movie has nothing new to say about anything and does so with a minimum of humor or interest.
The movie is done by hand-held camera. The camera jerks constantly, even when focused on a character who isn't moving. I suppose this is meant to convey tension but for me it simply increased my boredom and annoyance and I found myself looking away it times.
I don't speak Spanish, so looking away meant missing the captions, yet I didn't get the sense that I missed anything because each scene dragged on and on to make its point.
One further annoyance: when the Spanish-speaking characters encountered German speakers, the captions stop. This is a pretty common practice. Problem is, some of the actors' accents are so thick that their English is unintelligible. This wasn't too great a loss because no one was saying anything very interesting anyway.
Reviews
2 Reviews
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(2008)
Typical Hardy, and that's not meant as praise
12 January 2009
Warning: Spoilers
The production is excellent, I give it that. But what a waste of resources. The story is so typical of Hardy, with coincidences and accidents of timing piled one on top of the other until the whole thing teeters and falls. By the final 20 minutes or so I was groaning as the coincidences piled up ever faster. It is amazing to me how Hardy characters are able to walk for what seems like days on end, only to arrive in the same place started. How characters out of touch with each other can find one another with ease when it suits the plot, and cannot find each other at all at other times. And how widely dispersed characters can all arrive at the same miserable place, with no explanation at all. For those concerned about spoilers, I urge that you skip over the introduction tacked onto the show by PBS. In a few words the presenter effectively tells you the ending. The morons who write these introductions should be shot. They accomplish one thing only, which is to make us miss Alistair Cooke and Russell Baker even more.
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