Word: schindler
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...decries violence, such as Menace II Society or Natural Born Killers during which the audience, rather than being shocked or angered by the scenes of random violence and murder, instead breaks into applause and laughter. A friend of mine told me that she even experienced this when she saw Schindler's List...
Apart from this scene, the film's first hour is unimaginably tedious. One keeps praying for the massacre to come, and when it does come, it is a beaut. Some reviewers have accused Chereau of cribbing from "Schindler's List" in this set piece, but apart from being chronologically impossible, the reviewers miss the point about visual influences. When Chereau stages the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, he has the entire tradition of French art behind him. The artfully twisted limbs and contorted white bodies come not from "Schindler's List" but from The Raft of the Medusa...
...Beethoven's tormented love life seems to have the potential to titillate. Rose takes his cue from a real love letter written by the composer on his death bed. (Scholars have been unable to determine the true identity of the "immortal beloved" to whom the letter was addressed.) Anton Schindler is the heroic detective in the film's search for the mystery woman. Schindler (Jeroen Krabbe) is Beethoven's miserably earnest friend...
...Schindler's quest to find the "immortal beloved" begins at a hotel where the composer and his beloved supposedly had a final, ill-fated rendez-vous. "I can only wemember ze damage," declares the elderly hotel-keeper, as the composer's shadowy past begins to come to life through a series of flashbacks complete with the requsite squiggly line effects...
Isabella Rosselini and Valeria Golino, who play two of Beethoven's mistresses, suffer the similar fate of not having much to do. The audience is lead to belive, as Schindler does, that one of them is the "immortal beloved," and director Rose wastes a great deal of time with boring subplots concerning their lives...