Elective Affinities

Starring:Isabelle Huppert, Fabrizio Bentivoglio, Jean-Hugues Anglade, Marie Gillain, Massimo Popolizio, Laura Marinoni, Consuelo Ciatti, Stefania Fuggetta, Gavino Bondioli, Massimo Grigo, Adelaide Foti, Giancarlo Carboni, Giancarlo Giannini
Director: Vittorio Taviani, Paolo Taviani
Studio: Fox Lorber
Product Type: DVD

Description

This beautifully photographed adaptation of a Goethe novel details the collapse of an aristocratic marriage. Carlotta (Isabelle Huppert, I Heart Huckabees) and Edouard (Jean-Hugues Anglade, Queen Margot) live a peaceful and happy life in a picturesque Tuscan villa. Their marital bliss is shattered when Edouard's closed friend and Carlotta's goddaughter arrive for an extended stay. A dinner conversation about "elective affinities" in nature leads the four to experience the phenomenon in real life, drastically changing their lives forever.

Customer Reviews:

A is with B.C is with D.A goes with C and B goes with D...and we have a mess!!!!.......2007-05-01

Sometimes anymore than two can upset the delicate balance.When Carlotta and Edouard meet again after a twenty year absence,their love is rekindled,they marry and retire to his inherited Tuscan villa for at least one year of wedded bliss.Edouard,feeling the need to invite his old chum Otto to help with further land development on the estate does so and,unfortunately the rest of the film is doomed to play out what Carlotta's face expresses....the inevitable "I don't think this is such a good idea,Edouard.Three is a crowd!!!".Carlotta invites her step daughter,Otelia, and four people at the Tuscan retreat seems to right the balance again.The rest of the story is so silly that I will not waste yours or my time.

I will basically conclude here with these few thoughts: If this had not been an adaptation of a Goethe novel,a period piece of the 1800's, lavishly shot in breathtaking Tuscany, and starring Isabelle Huppert, I would have NEVER completed this positively insufferable movie.It is that bad! I would have loved to be more generous and genial in my remarks, but this truly was mind-numbingly horrible. Spoken in very rapid Italian (one fights to keep up with the whirlingly fast and long yellow subtitles!) with positively ridiculous closeup (no less) voiceovers for the French Huppert,the acting is as wooden as a nutcracker in a ballet (actually a nutcracker would have been more interesting!) Huppert, who has seen moments of brilliance on screen, follows the same line of tiresome icyness as she portrayed in MADAME BOVARY.The rest of the actors are completely forgettable.

Apart from the cinematography, this film would have been 0 stars.

"This tragedy comes as deliverance.".......2004-01-15

"Elective Affinities" is set in 19th Century Italy. Widow Carlotta (Isabelle Huppert) and Edouard (Jean-Hugues Anglade) meet again after a twenty-year separation. Their interrupted love affair immediately resumes, and they marry quickly. The blissful couple retreat to Edouard's Tuscany villa, but when he announces that he's invited his friend, architect, Ottone to stay, Carlotta is concerned that their solitude will be ruined. And it is ....

Ottone spends an evening explaining how elements "give up original bonds and reform", and he even draws a little diagram to illustrate his subject. This is so heavy-handed that it comes as no surprise when Carlotta decides to invite her stepdaughter, Ottilia is join the fun in the country--and the idea is, naturally, that the four people will be affected by each other and form new relationships.

At this point, I thought I was perhaps about to watch some sort of film with a free-love message--you know--a sort of 19th Century "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice" complete with bed hopping. I was wrong. The film degenerated into an overly-sentimental, queasy, self-righteous story with a heavy moral message. The guilty twist and suffer, and the morally correct characters are, well ... insufferable.

It was a little unsettling to see Isabelle Huppert play the role of Carlotta--rather a cold fish, and it was especially un-nerving to see her close-up dubbed speeches. Otto's character was wooden, and Edouard rather unbelievable--his eagerness at several points in the film was quite nauseating. The one 'steamy' scene was tepid at best--and again--extraordinarily heavy-handed. Two stars awarded to this film for the beautiful cinematography-displacedhuman

Slow, very slow.......2001-02-12

I was going to write a review of this, but there is little I can add to Peter Shelley's very perceptive review. I will relate my experience with the video. I chose it more or less at random, as I sometimes do (in this way I try to extent my horizons, or at least to come face to face with something different), but partially because it starred French actress Isabelle Huppert, whose work I admire. As I shifted in my seat through the languid development, I thought how odd and how out of sync with a modern story this is! Strangely coy and even "Victorian" for an Italian movie! After some time it occurred to me that the only explanation is that it was adapted from an eighteenth century novel! For some reason The Sorrows of Young Werther came to mind. When I discovered that Elective Affinities was indeed based on a novel by Goethe, I was very pleased with myself until I noticed on the video jacket a reference to Goethe that I must have read and forgotten.

Let me quote a passage from Goethe's novel, Elective Affinities (1808) found in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations that goes a long ways toward explaining why Carlotta (Huppert) does not immediately divorce her cheating husband and take up with the dashing architect: "The sum which two married people owe to one another defies calculation. It is an infinite debt, which can only be discharged through all eternity." Carlotta represents Goethe's point of view.

I would also like to note that this is not Huppert at her best. She is too much long of face, and that sly cynicism of hers is a little too much on display. Additionally (I guess I can't help but review this a little!) the self-satisfied privilege of the upper classes depicted here allows one to understand the reasons for the revolutions that would again and again threaten the old order in Europe throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.

don't vote for this one.......2000-11-05

This 1996 Italian-French co-production by the Taviani brothers is like an imported box of eaten chocolates - pretty but empty. Based on a novel by Goethe, the story reads like a folk tale with a weak ending. The title refers to a love quartet in a Tuscan villa where an aristocratic married couple become involved with the husband's best friend and the wife's goddaughter, and their affections are traded. The Taviani's gives us a laboured chalk-board explaination of this equation, but also a sex scene with imagined interchangeable partners. Goethe gets all mystical in having the product of the night born by the wife, but with features of the best friend and goddaughter. The child however gets an unintentional laugh since it's thick red hair makes it resemble Chucky from the Child Play series. The film is hampered by a narration by Giancarlo Giannini and dubbing of the actors, since it appears only Fabrizio Bentivoglio as the best friend is speaking Italian, and the others French. In spite of my disappointment over the dubbing of Huppert in particular, and her being saddled with an unflattering black wig, she manages to invest her wife with humour and pathos. Ironically the dubbing of Jean-Hugues Anglade as the husband and the Taviani's direction make him less mannered than usual, though his scenes of physical injury recall his indulgent death scene in Queen Margo. The opening image of a drowned statue of Venus made me think this would be a story of female suffering, and though this image is never given any resonance, there is a disproportionate guilt about the situation as Huppert feels guilty and Anglade does not. We may already think that any man who is prepared to give up Isabelle Huppert is a fool but when he also displays no grief over the death of a family member, all empathy goes out the window. The Taviani's style saves this from being a total failure. They provide some nice editing dissolves, a dance on weak wooden boards of a bridge, and a shocking act of refusal to eat. The final image of a child servant crying over a loss like an animal in the wilderness might have worked better if the story had come together in a more satisfying way, and I could have done without the running gag of the same servant carrying luggage according to her employer's whim.

A pleasant film to watch..........2000-06-26

Made by the Taviani brothers, "Elective affinities" is well..., not exactly up to expectation. The film is simple and precise, which I find quite pleasant. It is based on a novel by Goethe, and the story shows how human lives are unable to match mathematical formulas.(Quite frankly, I find it curious matching something as illogical as emotions with something rational.) As the plot goes... A woman engages her lover and then, wed. They settle in on his estate and then the husband's friend arrives for a visit, at almost the same time the women's young daughter appears. Hmm... wonder what's going to happen?

However... some scenes tend to be routine though, which I didn't particularly like. But, overall... an agreeable film to watch... 3 stars.

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