Changing Times
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Movie Reviews of Changing Times
Movie Review: Love in various stages of our lives
Summary: 4 Stars
Who has not gone thru their life, looked back and wondered what would have happened if we made our choices differently when we were young? Those choices would affect all aspects of our lives: who we are today on both personal an professional level and how well we did in the course of making those choices? This story explores search for such questions. Is it possible to reclaim love lost long ago and pick it up from there? Antoine is successful architect who has managed to track love of his youth in North Africa. In order to approach her, he even accepts the job there, so that he can rekindle their relationship from 30 years ago. But while Antonine is unmarried and childfree, his former lover has an adult son and is married to a North African doctor younger than herself. She still has her career in radio but unknown to the outside world she is struggling with her own internal demons: her husband's practice is a failing one and he spends more time at home, womanizing behind her back and swimming in the pool behind their house; her son is bisexual with child of his own who lives in France and has difficulty identifying if he is African or French; her career is evolving at its own pace, but her work does not pay much and in spite of living in Afica for decades, she is still very French as she still speaks only French language - whichmakes her circle of friends quite limited. The appearance of her first love is not making it easier in the emotional mess that she is in. Is our heroine going to remain in her status quo marriage or take a leap and reclaim her love long lost? See this film and find out!Movie Review: Changing Times
Summary: 4 Stars
It was nice to Catherine and Gerard acting together. They have tremendous chemistry. The film proves that not all love is lost over the years. It was a touching film of re-discovering love. Andre Techine is a master of showing the world the simple details of life.Movie Review: "You can't possess someone without causing harm,"
Summary: 3 Stars
Apparently in André Téchiné's Changing Times Gérard Depardieu and Catherine Deneuve are together again after appearing in The Last Metro all those years ago. Surely though, they could have picked better material than this to appear in.
This strangely turgid and dramatically static drama is set in Morocco and features some great views of Tangier, and tries to probe the cultural gulf between the French ex-pats who live there and the Muslims, but the film comes across more as a vehicle for a reunion between two great French acting legends than anything else.
Depardieu plays Antoine, a successful construction supervisor who is in Tangier, to oversee a new housing project, but his reasons for being there are not exclusively professional. Antoine as it turns out still holds a flame for Cecile (Deneuve), the first and only great love of Antoine's life.
It's been more than 30 years since they split up, but Antoine, who never married, has apparently never stopped thinking about her for a single minute of a single day. So whilst Antoine seems determined to live the bachelor life, Cecile's life is so complex that she seems unendingly short-tempered.
Cecile is the host of a successful local radio show, is married to Nathan, a Moroccan doctor (Gilbert Melki), and has a grown son named Sami (Malik Zidi), who makes his home in Paris but has returned to Tangier with his own issues. Sami has bought Nadia, (Lubna Azabal.) to Tangier with her son, but he is equally interested in rekindling a relationship with a local Moroccan boy Bilal (Idir Rachati). Nadia, in turn, has a problematic relationship with a more traditional twin sister named Aicha she hasn't seen in six years.
The whole proceedings verge on tawdry soap opera and although these characters are richly textured and undeniably sympathetic, the under-written screenplay doesn't really give them much to do. There's very little plot and even less drama, so the whole film comes across as desultory at best. And in a totally silly turn of events, Antoine attempts to persuade Cecile to fall in love with him by consulting Nabila (Nabila Baraka), seeking a voodoo spell that would awaken Cecile's love for Antoine.
Though Téchiné doesn't deal with it in a ham-fisted way, his film is also interested in exploring what it is like to live in a city where cultures crash, Tangier is obviously a city where McDonald's and traditional sorcery both do a thriving business practically side by side and where illegal immigrants camp out in the coast, waiting for an opportunity to travel to Spain.
Changing Times feels like three separate movies all plied into one. Sami who is trying to balance his relationship with Nadia and Bilal feels like it comes from a totally separate film and Nadia's efforts to see her twin sister also feels like a sort of add-on.
Also, Deneuve and Depardieu don't have a lot of chemistry together; consequently, you never get the feeling that this is supposed to be the timeless love and devotion. As it stands Changing Times is a rather spotted and ramshackle film that tries to explore the themes of eternal passion but comes across as rather shallow and unsophisticated. Mike Leonard October 06.
Movie Review: Unchanging Themes
Summary: 3 Stars
French film directors -- forgive me for generalizing! -- seem to have an unquenchable thirst for dramas of obscure passion and contorted relationships, 'romantic comedies' that are anything but comic. The best of such films are delightfully whimsical as they flirt with despair and betrayal. The worst of them bog down in simple melodrama or clog their scripts with implications of more profundity than they deliver. "Changing Times" is neither among the best nor the worst. It's a well-made film that goes nowhere ... well acted on the whole and creatively filmed but not very engaging.
The exception to the 'well acted' tag is the performance of Gerard Depardieu as Antoine, a successful engineer who has rekindled an obsession with his "first love" Cecile after thirty years and who comes to Morocco to recapture .... what? her of course, but also his own emotional wholeness. Unfortunately, Depardieu is the most over-used actor in the business and thus has exhausted his credibility in any role except the role of himself. Alas, he was superb in his prime, even though he was always too recognizable really to cloak himself in a character. His best role ever was Cyrano. Now he's become lumpish, luggish, and sluggish. Possibly an 'actor' instead of a 'star' might have brought this script to life ...
... but the marketing ploy of "Changing Times" was obviously the reuniting of Depardieu with Catherine Deneuve (Cecile), whose on-screen romances had been compelling decades ago. It's interesting, in a modest way, to behold them as aging and fading lovers; Deneuve reveals herself as a mummification of beauty in a way that suits the script and the mood of the film. But that cinema-history fascination is scarcely enough to compel an audience's attention for 100 minutes, so naturally there are sub-plots, sub-romances, that should offer sub-tleties but don't. Ceciles's husband is a repulsive narcissist, acted very convincingly by Gilbert Melki. Their son is a repulsive bi-sexual narcissist, absorbed in his identity crisis as half French and half Moroccan. His male lover in Morocco and his female lover in Paris seem both to understand his shallow commitment to anyone but himself better than he does, yet they allow him to gratify his selfishness with painful passivity. The female lover is a Moroccan whose twin sister rejects her -- wisely, one would say -- but who is herself drug-addicted and emotionally unavailable to her son. And the twin sister eventually runs off with the husband. How operatic! How French! The secondary characters are all excellent in their roles, perhaps because they are 'unknown' as stars.
And there's the setting: Tangiers, Morocco. Frankly, not much of the place is revealed, aside from a scene that shows a sullen throng of Sub-Saharan Africans waiting on the cliffs outside the city for any desperate opportunity to cross the straits to Europe. Why bother with such dabs of sociology if nothing is meant by them? I've been to Tangiers; this film avoided any evocation of the mood of the place as I remember it.
Bottom line? Watch it if it's offered on an Air France flight, but don't bother to rent it.
Movie Review: changing deneuve
Summary: 1 Stars
who could possibly have nothing better to do than watch this nonsense !? a half hour of it and i was dumbstruck w boredom---- exit me-- but one more thing -i used to love both these actors` work---- esp depardiue in his best vehicle-- going places--- a gem-- and she was always great to watch----esp in repulsion---- deneuve had this wonderful face-- it was very expressive in its way--- u could literally read her lips--- her whole face used to register emotions-- that she was also pretty in the classic sense added to her attraction and demure magic--- gone-- all of it--- vanity takes another actress`s prime instrument --her face--gone- she blew up her lips-- so they no longer register anything -static fake looking lips---- her eyes-- brows --something around there that used to be alive is dead now- frozen - botoxed into a mask like thing that might as well be ---a mask !!!!----there are nerve endings in these facial gifts that are wired just so by the archtitect of life if u will-actors should never screw with these delicate things - esp since we see them blown up the size of a house--- emblazoned in the minds of movie goers and fans--these delicate features we have come to watch w mesmerizing concentration at their best--- working a kind of magic with their instruments---and they screw them around so they no longer work and look completely ridiculous- blown up the size of a house----a pitiful shame-join the others-- cher jessica lang and the rest--- bye---unless they get into kabuki theatre of course
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