It was great to see the crowd for this film at my local cinema. Yes, the reviews for this look like they are all over the map. But let it be said that without this fantastic casting (Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried-a powerful erotic trio), the glorious cinematography and the wildly gorgeous sound track, it might be all of what these arm chair critics are saying. We live only a few miles from Canada by air but it might as well be Istanbul in the hands of this director. Magically the city of Toronto in winter is like another world, with a sleek modern feel that is alluring and cold at the same time. This is the perfect setting for a movie rich in the cloaked emotion of the upper class, lost in a deep freeze. Watching the film in spring in California, makes it seem even more unreal and foreign. In this landscape of ice, we see the characters emerge as modern people lost, alienated, hungary for love and even just human touch. This is a movie of antithesis, and startling allusions of the duality between trust and fear, openness and truth and the hard fact of emotional allusion and mirror like dreams. This film has nothing to do with Hitchcock and everything to do with Bunuel, and the deep wave of surrealist magic still washing on the shore of French thought and culture. Yes the ending is dubious, but it can't crush your response. For those of you wide awake enough to enjoy this, you will be rewarded in ways that American directors rarely seem to reach. What I say is bravo!I believe that for these moments, such dreams are very real.
