Search - Charlotte Gray on DVD

Swoon!

kemp | 07/20/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I LOVED this movie. From the second it started, with its gorgeous shots of French lilacs or lavender or whatever beautiful purple flower they are, & its sublime musical score by Stephen Warbeck, I was hooked. Cate Blanchett is always dependably good, but she really shines here. Her role is that rare thing- a woman who is not a doormat, a girlfriend, a hooker, or a nun, and she never gets naked. How refreshing! Plus, it's directed by a woman- too cool! I found the love story between the characters of Charlotte Gray & Peter Gregory very believable & terribly romantic, and, as it should, it drives the film to its logical conclusion- a heartbreaking one. Indeed several scenes in this film made my eyes well up with tears. I also appreciated how Charlotte's experiences with loss weren't just glossed over, as in most movies I've seen where someone loses a loved one and by the next scene they're back to normal. Ms. Blanchett is to be commended for bringing that bit of true humanity to her character. It's just an all around beautifully made film, and I admire everyone involved in the making of it. The director's commentary is also very good and worth listening to, however she gives A LOT away, including parts of the book that weren't included in the film. She does a good job of answering her critics during her commentary, particularly speaking about her reasons for having the characters speak English, which originally struck me as a bit odd, but her reasons are legitimate, and, after all "Chocolat" & "Schindler's List," to name just two, are in English & nobody complained about that. One minor thing that I found annoying, though, was the quality of the disc's supplemental materials- they misspelled...both Cate Blanchett's & novelist Sebastian Faulks' names- shame on them!"

Her name is Charlotte Gray.

kemp | 12/27/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Magnificent throwback to the great espionage / romance movies of the Second World War. It begins briskly: young Scotswoman Charlotte Gray (Cate Blanchett) is riding in a train headed for London, reading Stendahl in the original French. Suddenly her compartment is invaded by a "civil servant" -- of the type characteristic in the novels of Graham Greene -- whose "cheerio", "Right, then!" manner doesn't obscure his knowing, nosy, calculated-for-effect questioning of the young woman. (He instantly takes note that she's fluent in French.) Miss Grey is not any more fooled than we are. The man leaves her an RSVP card for a "book launch" in London, and Charlotte, DYING for adventure, takes him up on it, suspecting that it's an invitation for something a little more important than bookchat. Of course she's proven right . . . and finds her destiny in one night, meeting a lover (an RAF pilot on leave) while putting her toe in the doorjamb of the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.). The movie's set-up is superbly free of expository nonsense. She falls in love with her pilot and loses him (he's M.I.A. in Vichy) in the space of five minutes, and before you know it, she's training at the S.O.E. and free-falling via parachute into enemy territory. Ostensibly Charlotte is a courier and intelligence operative whose mission is to assist the local French Resistance, but her personal motivation is to search for her missing fly-boy. Another director might have taken an hour to arrive at this juncture, but Gillian Anderson is not interested in the boring stuff. She's interested in character. She's interested in her heroine's self-discovery, and finds it especially interesting that the heroine achieves self-discovery while pretending to be somebody else. Anderson is also interested in sacrifices, choices, and the consequences of each. It's all pretty heady stuff, which has apparently sailed over the heads of most of the reviewers here. I'm dumbfounded by the disdain from the female reviewers with regards to *Charlotte Gray*, a truly feminist movie if there ever was one. The editorial review (by a female) grouses about how the French speak English while the Germans speak German. That's insipid criticism: was she equally harsh on *Schindler's List*, a movie in which we have to endure laughable German accents from Messrs. Neeson and Fiennes while they speak ENGLISH? I doubt it. But hey, *Charlotte Gray* didn't make a lot of money, didn't win awards, isn't "taught" in high schools, so it must be bad. Another female reviewer (a Top 50 Reviewer, no less), complained about Ms. Blanchett's "perfect lipstick" throughout. The nature of these critical remarks reveals a good deal about their authors' intellectual capacity. You be the judge. But it's only fair to point out that this movie IS old-fashioned, after all: perhaps Julia Roberts' foul-mouthed Erin Brockovich suits the more cosmopolitan taste of today's gentler sex. -- Speaking of gentler sex . . . Cate Blanchett is ENTHRALLING. Fiercely intelligent, feminine, lovely, and tough as a mountain. What an amazing actress!"