Warning: spoilers
Who
can help but have high expectations of a film whose
IMDb keywords include "bathtub scene," "bisexuality," "falsely
accused," "nurse," "French resistance" and "shot in the
back"?
But
it's hard to take a film like that too seriously, which
turns out to be the best way to enjoy director John Duigan's
Head in the Clouds. Clouds won't have you
shrieking with delight as something campy like Showgirls
inevitably does, but it is a whole lot more entertaining
if you suspend any expectation of realism and revel in its
absurdity.
Taking lighthearted enjoyment in a drama centered around war-torn
Europe requires a certain permission not necessary for a movie
about backstabbing topless dancers in Vegas. But Clouds
is first and foremost a love story, with war as the backdrop,
rather than a wartime epic as told through a love story. In
the nine-minute "Making of Head in the Clouds" featurette
included on the DVD release, Duigan says the war is like another
character in the film, which may explain why the war itself
is also hard to take seriously.
Clouds
spans fifteen years, from the late '20s through the early
'40s, and takes place in England, Spain, and, mainly, France.
Covering this kind of terrain in a 132-minute film could easily
turn out choppy results, but Duigan glides through decades
and vast territory with graceful ease.
Charlize Theron stars as Gilda Bessé, the
rather annoying daughter of an American socialite she claims
she hardly ever knew and a French champagne magnate with a
mansion to rival Versaille and nearly enough contempt for
his daughter to satisfy even the most irritated viewer. Gilda
meets Guy (played by Theron's real-life husband, Stuart Townsend),
a working-class Irish student, when she ducks into his rooms
at Cambridge after a forbidden tryst with a don, and promptly
has him help her out of her rain-soaked togs.
Her
sexiness has all the subtlety of a Showgirls dance
number, and is more likely to elicit eye-rolling than jaw-dropping.
But Guy can only resist her for so long, and soon the two
are at it atop a billiard table. When Julian finds the pair
cozied up the morning after his birthday party and asks Gilda
what she's got on underneath the sheet, she replies, "Well,
seeing it's your big day, I'm wearing my birthday suit in
your honor."
Thus
begins our indoctrination into Gilda's witty
free-spiritedness, which might otherwise be mistaken for petulant
frivolity. When Guy tells Gilda that Julian is upstairs writing
a poem on Guy's date's belly, her only reaction is to smile
and say she feels sorry for the woman because Julian's a terrible
poet. Guy invites the audience to share in his captivated
take on Gilda: "You're very modern aren't you?"
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