The writing on this movie is so weak that I found it hard to pay attention. Even gorgeous shots of the Tuscan countryside, a beautiful young actress, and Vanessa Redgrave can't make this thing work. It has a few affecting moments, but they aren't worth it.
There were a few additional flaws that annoyed me further. Having worked in restaurants, I find the chef character to be completely unreal. I can't picture a chef feeding uncooked noodles to his fiancé. The main female character is a fact checker for the New Yorker. We first see her checking out the famous photo from the end of World War II where a sailor is kissing a woman on the street. She is finding out whether or not this event was staged by tracking down and questioning people who appeared in the photo. Having written for magazines, I found her having been assigned this task to be the statistical equivalent of finding the Hope Diamond in the gutter. Even though they meant to inject some excitement into a boring job this way, they also failed to do this.
The New Yorker agrees to publish her article about long lost lovers finding each other. They recognize that it is a good article. That's not what the New Yorker is famous for. They stopped having a masthead so people couldn't even address their queries to the right person. There was a famous incident where they threw away all the unsolicited submissions but cut off the stamps from the stamped self addressed envelopes for their own use. The sight of a sober, sane editor calmly assessing a good article and agreeing to publish it is something that seldom happens in publishing. To imagine what a real editor is like, inject irrational jealously, envy and cocaine addiction to the scene. (I've never written for the New Yorker, this is just a general impression of magazine editors.)
But I digress. In short, this movie is something you might check out on TV if you have nothing else to do. Vanessa Redgrave gave a good performance, and the actor who played her long lost love wasn't bad, but that doesn't make this movie worth seeing.
There were a few additional flaws that annoyed me further. Having worked in restaurants, I find the chef character to be completely unreal. I can't picture a chef feeding uncooked noodles to his fiancé. The main female character is a fact checker for the New Yorker. We first see her checking out the famous photo from the end of World War II where a sailor is kissing a woman on the street. She is finding out whether or not this event was staged by tracking down and questioning people who appeared in the photo. Having written for magazines, I found her having been assigned this task to be the statistical equivalent of finding the Hope Diamond in the gutter. Even though they meant to inject some excitement into a boring job this way, they also failed to do this.
The New Yorker agrees to publish her article about long lost lovers finding each other. They recognize that it is a good article. That's not what the New Yorker is famous for. They stopped having a masthead so people couldn't even address their queries to the right person. There was a famous incident where they threw away all the unsolicited submissions but cut off the stamps from the stamped self addressed envelopes for their own use. The sight of a sober, sane editor calmly assessing a good article and agreeing to publish it is something that seldom happens in publishing. To imagine what a real editor is like, inject irrational jealously, envy and cocaine addiction to the scene. (I've never written for the New Yorker, this is just a general impression of magazine editors.)
But I digress. In short, this movie is something you might check out on TV if you have nothing else to do. Vanessa Redgrave gave a good performance, and the actor who played her long lost love wasn't bad, but that doesn't make this movie worth seeing.