Lentävä hollantilainen

One has really to fit in the widely accepted image of a bull-headed American, to classify this film as "ugly" (I address one of the previous comments). In this film, Stelling, in my opinion, really succeeds to recreate the "look and feel" of the 18th century western Europe, which one can get a grip of by looking at the paintings of the great artists of the epoch. The characters are "painted" equally well, the acting is more than "just" good, and the story is solid, mesmerizing, and above all human (in the real, "old", sense of the word, which has little to do with contemporary liberalism). The film has ideas and images borrowed from the art and literature of the period, but it prefers to build upon them rather than to use them as they are, and the result is interesting, thought-provoking and sometimes amusing (e.g., the "breugelian" dwarf, Campanella). It is tragic and revolves around the basic spiritual symbols of the Christian civilization. As such, it can be interpreted as an allegory (which had a fundamental meaning in those ages society). And I found this allegory to be very appealing.

P.S. Sorry for possible grammatical or syntactical mistakes in the text. I'm not a native English speaker.