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Three young girls consult a fortune teller who refuses to tell what she has seen, except to say
that something unspeakable awaits one of the girls at age 34. That girl is Gilda Besse (Charlize Theron), who, now in college, may not look it but she's notorious in the Oxford
campus where she has an affair with a professor. One rainy night, while trying to evade the campus scouts, she pops into the room of Guy (Stuart Townsend). She
accepts—as if expecting it—Guy's offer of refuge for the night. They share the bed, but nothing happens. Except that from then on Gilda becomes an obsession for
the poor Guy. Years later Gilda invites her to Paris where she is now a famous photographer having an affair with her model Mia (Penelope Cruz), a political
activist. Soon they become a threesome, sharing one life, roof and bed.
Peopled by strong, well-defined characters, a movie like Head in the Clouds
needs actors who can stand up to their roles; otherwise it will collapse, especially with such a preposterous plot. Acting is adequate, but it is the characters which seem obviously and shamelessly man-made. At the end of the movie you feel like the events were put together in order to justify the characters' existence—and not the other way around, with the characters evolving and being shaped by their responses to the events in their lives. Cinematography also gets away with recreating the period around World War II, with film clips (possibly from documentaries or a good facsimile of them) in black and white.
Head in the Clouds has enough material in it to animate a week's worth of family discussions, basically because it treads on dangerous grounds
like promiscuity. sex for convenience, sex as overpowering animal instinct—all of which Gilda indulges in with various partners, each having a different motive for pairing off
with her The substance of the story derives from the unprocessed issues of the persons involved, particularly Gilda's, since she seems to be the sun in a solar system of
flawed characters in the story. She begins as a strong, brave, daring and free-spirited woman and ends up revealed as someone who knows the world but not herself—indeed, a
woman with her feet tied to a four-poster bed and with her head in the clouds. The story tries to bring out the values of love, service and patriotism, but unfortunately
these are overshadowed by the length of footage devoted to libidinal liberties. Although the ending shows the consequences of misguided lusts, what remains in the mind
are the overpowering images of the sin; an adult viewer can read the good between the lines, but impressionable minds will remember the pictures.
(Date Reviewed: 13 May 2005)
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