Reviews & Ratings for
Melancholian 3 huonetta More at IMDbPro »

37 out of 40 people found the following review useful:
Wonderful Portrait of Melancholia, 1 January 2006

Author: R_Binnendijk from Utrecht, The Netherlands

Hello,

I just saw Three rooms of melancholia and I strongly disagree with some of the reviews. I must say I have no experience with homeless children in Russia but that's not what the film is about. I don't understand that You don't understand, this film is about "melancholia" (which the title indicates) and regarding this, the Three rooms of melancholia suffices. It is poetic documentary, and you will hardly find interviews in this cinematic mode. It tries not to judge and I think it succeeded. For example: it shows that the army saves children from the streets but on the other hand prepares them to be soldiers in cruel wars. The film touches the very soul of the "problem" and does not concern personal problems, told in cheap (American- style)interviews. It is a tacit portrait about the poems of that one boy and the grief of the mother and the fact that the boys in Ingushetia have little interest in a new day, that are symbols of the happiness, grief and aftermath of a compléte nation. I can understand that your topic of preference is not treated the way You would do it (probably to attend everybody to it) but then, this is not a news report nor some charity attention, but a film about the artist's interpretation of melancholia.

7 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
A documentary of great importance, 22 April 2006

Author: hie_merit from Finland

I am very taken of the silent way Honkasalo has documented this topic. She has managed to form a very touching, dramatic yet aesthetic picture of the problems that children face in war. This is an issue way too little discussed and I hope that one day the tragedies of Chechnya would be in the media spotlight in the way the middle east. Sadly Russia's "democracy" is something that the west does not want to touch since we depend on e.g. natural resources that Putin kindly provides us. This documentary will shock, even if it really doesn't bring anything new that one wouldn't have known from before. But it doesn't gloat with the suffering and violence that the children have had to go through, but rather lets you feel and empathize for yourself - have your own feelings.

4 out of 24 people found the following review useful:
absolutely dreadful, but her next film will be great, 11 August 2006

Author: john-hakalax-1 from Finland

I expected a lot from this documentary as I had heard many hailing opinions about it, especially from representatives of the Finnish Film Foundation and Finnish AVEK which were the main backers of the film. Even though I had read that Honkasalo made only one brief shooting trip to Checnya for this documentary (Anna Politkovskaja made more than 60 trips for her fatal honest writing) I had full trust in the content of it.

Unfortunately I have to confess that I was terribly disappointed with The Three Rooms of Melancholia. The only thing that made me smile was the view of the end credits and the fact that I had been smart enough to borrow the tape for free. It was really hard to watch this over-pretentious film, cause it was so dreadfully boring due to its contrived and hopelessly thick and artificial feeling of fake melancholy. A gray lifeless sentiment the director Pirjo Honkasalo holds lazily onto throughout the film, arrogantly ignoring the audience natural need for at least some occasional change in the mood.

Despite this complete failure, I think Pirjo Honkasalo's next film Pattaya Go! Go! - currently in the cooker with one of the funniest documentary directors in Scandinavia and with the Finnish Dokumenttikilta association - will become a very thought-provoking and different kind of documentary. In the name of art and entertainment Pirjo Honkasalo will together with her creative allies boldly tell the true story of a group of freshly sacked Finnish paper mill workers' shameless sex trip to Pattaya in Thailand.

17 out of 60 people found the following review useful:
Why label the already once disgraced as the hopelessly pitiful?, 24 July 2005

Author: jeannedarc from Russian Federation

As a volunteer working with homeless children and youth in St Petersburg I had high expectations of the film 3 Rooms of Melancholia, since the film was said to reflect emotional and mental states related to children rejected from dysfunctional families and in general to the homeless.

However after seeing the film, I want to address that I am utterly shocked by the selfish and insensitive way the director Honkasalo dealt with the subjects of her documentary. Instead of giving the child interviewees a voice and a chance to talk about their lives before and during their military boarding school, this director serves us a series of narrated pathos-embedded statements depicting their awful backgrounds. As the homeless boys in the film are clearly working on restoring their crushed egos by trying to function progressively as group members in an institution accepted and respected by the society they live in, this immature, socio-pornographic primadonna comes with her pathological need to throw Gothic sensations out of her poetic dirt-bag. How little can a person understand the ashamed mind of the homeless and rejected and still be allowed to direct documentaries about this subject? The people awarding this documentary with human rights film prizes have little sense of the actual need the rejected and homeless have to be accepted as strong, progressive, dynamic characters who despite their socially disgraceful backgrounds can have their say in life without being publicly Kain-marked as the hopelessly pitiful.

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