The Triumph of Love (2002)

Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The acting in this movie is really good.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

I loved how it kept getting more and more complicated, more and more your palms sweat because you can't imagine how it could all work out in a logical way after such intrigues and lies. The movie caught my attention, but true, most of it was to see the ending, to see all the nods get untangled. I also loved the lack of shyness and ethical boundaries which you see in all the more "puritan" love comedies these days (which abound in sex related acts or words). Surely, I am not talking of sex when I say the main plot lacks shyness, but of a certain perversity of thought, a scheme for love. Of course it can never be imagined as true, but the story is, as it should be, a story.

I thought Mira Sorvino did a great job as did Ben Kingsley and all the others, however my real praise is for the woman who played the young man's patroness, Fiona Shaw, what a performance she produced, intense and perfect timing as well, absolutely great. I recommend the film as good fairly clean fun and a pleasure to watch. Mira was really well suited to this part, mischievous and sexy at the same time, she caught the spirit of this french semi-farce very well, although I could not see her as a young man at any time. Still she handled the part very well, it must be a considerable challenge to play the opposite sex. The author was of course well known in his day, and the play upon which this film was based was first performed we are told in 1732. I thought the attempt to include an audience very clumsy and actually did not realize what they were trying to do as I watched the film, right up to the ending credits when the cast appeared for a bow wearing modern clothes it escaped me. frankly I doubt it was worth the bother of attempting anyway, it doesn't add anything in my view.

Spoilers herein.Set physically in a well-manicured garden, managed by an obsessive gardener. Set philosophically in a similarly ordered mind-space, tended by two (co-equal) minds. Set dramatically in a narrative world formed by three cooperative directors (the original dramatist, the screen adapter, the filmer). Of these three, two of the affairs are false, and one is tentative. So we have the contemporary play audience flashed; we have the cinematic relationship similarly stuttered; we have the players playing actors playing roles (and one of these playing three roles to mirror the dramatist, adapter and filmer).`Love's Labor's Lost/Twelfth Night' meets `Rosencrantz and Guildenstern' meets `Draughtsman's Contract.'I love the idea, and appreciate the energy of the players and the apt set: that carried me over the flaws. But these flaws are significant: the excessive self-reference kills the rhythm of internal humor, the acting about acting seems downright silly in the many places where the enveloping direction was weak. The self-conscious editing was overly explicit, and could have easily been done precisely the same with bleeds instead of cuts with greater effect and no jarring.In the case of Peploe, the intelligence outstrips the skill -- in the case of the players, it is the other way around. I think a better strategy would be to try different philosophies of acting rather all from the same tradition as we have here. A more fluid camera could have helped as well. As it stands, we have something worth watching with the potential to have been great. But it abdicated.The director's credit at the beginning was one for the books. Perfect. It had the words stuck to the carriage wherein the characters are dressing as actors.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 4: Worth watching.

"Triumph of Love" is a silly little comedy about a woman (Sorvino) who dresses like a man to woo a woman and reveals her true sex to two men to woo them. The plot and her motives are elsewhere on this site. Having done that, she continues the scam on and on, engaging the trio of hapless would-be love interests over and over until the plot wears down to a nub. "Triumph..." is theater on film; a fact of which we're reminded by shots of an audience cloistered among the garden shrubs...an annoying interjection. A clumsy adaptation of theater for film, "Triumph..." will likely be of interest by only the most ardent aficionados of period plays. (C+)