Belle Epoque

Buy This Item Belle Epoque by Sony Pictures  Available from Amazon  $26.99  on 11-14-2008     This Spanish fluff from 1992 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but its significance goes about as far as you can throw a flower petal. The story finds an elderly artist (Fernando Fernán Gómez) giving shelter to a deserter (Jorge Sanz) from the royalist army in provincial Spain, 1931. While on the premises, the young man naturally notes the beauty of all four of his host's daughters. Each takes her turn at seducing him, but this isn't late-night cable TV so much as it is a series of brief character sketches filled out by the way each woman takes charge. It's a clever idea made more clever by the fact that these sundry beauties are acting on the libertine impulses to which their free-thinking father subscribes in principle but has sheepishly abandoned for love. But the film, directed by Fernando Trueba, is rendered so lightly it could almost be mistaken for calendar art. <I>--Tom Keogh</I> Reader Reviews Film set in 1930s Spain at the time of great political changes in the country. Young (former) seminary student who deserted from the Spanish Army is trying to get a new start in life. Circumstances bring him to a house of a man who has four (4) daughters: one is a young widow, another is engaged, the third one is a lesbian, while the youngest one is a virgin. As this young, confused man is jumping to bed with each one of them, hoping for love, it is less comical and more boring to observe a poor creature trapped in he house of women who is treated as a sex toy and yet gets lucky to marry the youngest one. Too unbelievable to be taken in even as a comedy. One of the early roles for (then) young Penelope Cruz.

Belle Epoque Available from Amazon Price: $26.99 Updated on 11-14-2008.

SPONSORED LINKS