The Lover (2002)

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I loved the atmosphere of the movie. The old ladies, the funeral, the trams, the snow, the Russian music from 30s. Interestingly, another reviewer pointed to a similar movie: Ferzan Ozpetek's His Secret Life. There is another movie dealing with consequences of death of the loved one, who actually cheated: Blue. I have not seen Ozpetek's movie, but Kieslowski's Blue was about the new found freedom and the creativity that is born out of loss of the family, but it comes to the wife that was seemingly completely dedicated to her family and husband before a tragic event. Here, the husband was, perhaps, a perennial flirt, perhaps, a bit of a cynic, but faithful, is completely devastated. He loses wife, and then son but differently -- it's not some just horrible event that takes the son, it's his wife's cheating. It seems the idea of the movie is good, but everything seems to be either over-written or under-performed, and so the flow of the movie is somehow not smooth and convincing enough.

This is an amazingly subtle and wise movie about the man who suddenly realizes that all his life is collapsed after he found the letter of his dead wife to the unknown lover.First of all, it's a very good script: excellent dialogues, developed characters. One of Oleg Yankovsky is brilliant with his manner of psychological self-defense. The analysis of this fearful situation is deep and develops, through the variation of black-humoured episodes, into the real human tragedy. The Russian cinema doesn't knew such films for years, and I think that "The Lover" is a real break-through (not from the point of view of box-office, but from one of something that we call "art").

It's a boring movie about a middle-aged man Dmitry who, after burying his younger wife Elena, finds out she had a lover for 15 years-that's the age of both their marriage and their son. Worse: all of Elena's relatives and friends turn out to have known about her affair. The widower and the lover then meet and engage into the most aimless pursuit of figuring out how long? When? What? And whose is the son? Valeri Todorovsky, the movie's director, must have thought he was unearthing the deepest layers of the so-called big Russian soul. What he succeeded in was a grim movie about male impotence. That impotence is the main characters' inability to overcome their grief and re-enter the world around them. As a way of coming to terms with it, Dmitry--representative of `intelligentsia' and a linguist--starts using foul language in class-something totally unacceptable in the Russian culture. Visuals in the movie are good as individual photographs but not as Motion pictures. Photography, that could be used to counterbalance Dmitry's hopelessness, only worsens the overall grim mood. A crane shot at the cemetery looks like it belongs in a music video. As I was watching the movie in a ¾-filled theater, I kept hearing hysterical laughter and applause in reaction to certain scenes. The movie does have its grotesque moments and a good deal of sarcasm, but they are buried in endless banalities. The funny thing is, the only people who applauded when the credits rolled, appeared to have been somehow related to the film crew. Ferzan Ozpetek's `Le Fate Ignoranti' is a much more interesting take on the same subject.