A fascinating film could be made of Seventeenth Century Amsterdam's equivalent of the South Sea Bubble and the Wall Street Crash, but this isn't it.
The troubled production of this big screen adaptation of Deborah Moggach's bestselling novel was charted in the press like that of 'Cleopatra' over half a century earlier and like that the end result is good-looking (the tulips standing out from the general murk as little splashes of colour like the fish in 'Rumble Fish') but garrulous and uninvolving; but mercifully a lot shorter.
Being a twenty-first century historical film it contains plenty of unsexy sex and vertiginous steadicam photography; and as in 'Cleopatra's day a big historical epic wasn't complete without a cameo by Finlay Currie, so the cast today inevitably includes Judi Dench.
The troubled production of this big screen adaptation of Deborah Moggach's bestselling novel was charted in the press like that of 'Cleopatra' over half a century earlier and like that the end result is good-looking (the tulips standing out from the general murk as little splashes of colour like the fish in 'Rumble Fish') but garrulous and uninvolving; but mercifully a lot shorter.
Being a twenty-first century historical film it contains plenty of unsexy sex and vertiginous steadicam photography; and as in 'Cleopatra's day a big historical epic wasn't complete without a cameo by Finlay Currie, so the cast today inevitably includes Judi Dench.