If "That's Entertainment!" is Hollywood's motto, many movies betray it: you go out to see a product of Hollywood entertainment, which has been sold as relaxing and amusing, and you return home more bored and depressed than when you left. «Prelude of a Kiss» is a good example. In this so-called comedy, the soul of robust Meg Ryan enters the octogenarian body of Sydney Walker and vice versa, to the uncontrollable crying of her husband Alec Baldwin.
An interesting premise taken from a play by Craig Lucas for the time of AIDS, it aims to show that we fall more in love with people's soul than with their bodies, but it soon has to admit that the body is also important, when Baldwin is in front of Walker's wrinkled face, under which Ryan's soul lives. If the exchange had been with the body of "bodies" of 1992, as Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, what direction would this story have taken...?
Somehow the film reminds me of the sequence in «Ghost» when the yuppie widow (Demi Moore) has a reunion with her dead husband (Patrick Swayze), through the body of a African American medium (Whoopi Goldberg), and when the time comes for the kiss, "the magic of cinema" conveniently replaced Whoopi with Swayze.
A verbose comedy to death, «Prelude to a Kiss» soon loses its charm, which director Norman René rarely avoids, as in his previous work, «Longtime Companion» (also with a script by Lucas) that suffered of the same theatricality.
An interesting premise taken from a play by Craig Lucas for the time of AIDS, it aims to show that we fall more in love with people's soul than with their bodies, but it soon has to admit that the body is also important, when Baldwin is in front of Walker's wrinkled face, under which Ryan's soul lives. If the exchange had been with the body of "bodies" of 1992, as Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, what direction would this story have taken...?
Somehow the film reminds me of the sequence in «Ghost» when the yuppie widow (Demi Moore) has a reunion with her dead husband (Patrick Swayze), through the body of a African American medium (Whoopi Goldberg), and when the time comes for the kiss, "the magic of cinema" conveniently replaced Whoopi with Swayze.
A verbose comedy to death, «Prelude to a Kiss» soon loses its charm, which director Norman René rarely avoids, as in his previous work, «Longtime Companion» (also with a script by Lucas) that suffered of the same theatricality.