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Tuesday, 15 August 2006 00:57 |
The highly committed performances of Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland, as well as stylish visual design and cinematography, give the film more gravitas than it would otherwise possess. The overly cluttered story line involves a mythical country led by Maximilian Jr. (Tom Hollander), a childlike, maniacal dictator who reserves his greatest pleasure for his sexual romps with his alternately bored and debauched wife (Lara Flynn Boyle).
Maximilian's greatest enemy is Thorne (Sutherland), a socialist-minded playwright (think Vaclav Havel) who is being kept under lock and key. Thorne's plight attracts the sympathy of Joe (Fiennes), one of his jailers, who ultimately helps him escape and even assassinate his tormentor. Problem is, once Thorne himself incites a revolution and comes into power, he is transformed into an even worse fascistic demagogue than his predecessor, coming to rule the country with an iron fist and ultimately imprisoning his former ally and subjecting him to various imaginative forms of torture.
This blending of Kafka, Orwell and nearly every other politically tinged writer you can think of contains so many contemporary and historical allusions that one becomes less engrossed in the story line than in playing the game of spot-the-references. And while the copious doses of outrageous black humor are not entirely unwelcome, the cartoonish nature of the proceedings eventually detracts from the power of the film's message.
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