For Love Alone

For Love of Helen

Helen Buday, whom I can only describe as the Australian Debra Winger, is in nearly every shot of this movie and I don't know what you would make of it if you didn't care for her "acting" style, which is diffuse. Unlike Winger, she doesn't care if you like her or not and there are lots of hurdles to get over before her natural charm takes over. She's no great beauty, and in repose her face looks as though some vital organ had been accidentally left out of it, perhaps a nose, or mouth, but if you can get used to her disconcerting Finding Nemo beauty you should do okay, because she's not a bad actress, just tiny.

Buday plays a young Australian woman who, with her sister, suffers the typical fate of an unmarried woman in the 30s--she is forced to live as an "old maid" holding down a tedious dead end job and yet having to cook, sew and clean up after her widowed father and a pair of incredibly cute brothers. The two sisters are always being treated like cattle, and they are subject to gibes about "no man in his right mind would ever want to marry either of you two crones." However an innate feminism prompts Terry to pack it all in and slave for three years to earn enough money to go to England to follow a charismatic stud called Jonathan Crow (played by Hugo Weaving from the Matrix and LOTR movies). For three years she can't afford even to buy a newspaper so she misses out on a lot of current events in the 1930s.

Hugo Weaving has bright blond hair in this movie and does most of his acting with it. He is inscrutable, but when his hair's mussed up he's feeling pretty good and when it's neatly combed back he must be angry with her. He's a cheater and it takes Teresa eons to figure it out, happily there's another man on the horizon, good old paternal Sam Neill, in glasses and ill fitting suits that are supposed to make him look dowdy but do nothing to disguise his legendary beauty. It's like re-doing LITTLE WOMEN and having Jude Law play kindly old Professor Bhaer. Plus he's rich and a banker and plus he adores her from the minute they meet cute on shipboard.

The movie is overambitious and its teeming crowd scenes are risible, as the same ten or eleven extras run in and out of train carriages in an attempt to make them seem populated. These extras also show up on an ocean liner having a swinging time blowing Christmas crackers and acting like they're in the world's biggest shipboard party. This movie, based on a wellknown novel by Australian modernist Christina Stead, features the very first screen appearance of future star Naomi Watts, who has one line early on. Don't wait till the end hoping to see her again, that one "Oh hi, how are you?" is it for Miss Watts, and it won't be for another five years that she got another role in film. No wonder she's got that bitter look in her eyes. January 24, 2007

Liked it, but not my style

If you like straight romance, with a hint of character study (albeit very little), then this may be an enjoyable movie. As for me, I liked it okay, but I found it a bit slow at the start. It does pick up the pace... about halfway through, but I suppose if I were a hopeless romantic, I'd enjoy it to the fullest. Don't misunderstand me, for I liked it okay. It was a good movie with a good ending, just not my style! June 7, 1999

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