Duped

My household recently signed up for the Netflix service and we've been enjoying it thoroughly, considering our concomitant recent purchase, a 46" DLP HDTV. One film we viewed this week nearly made us both ill and simultaneously gave us whiplash, as its storyline violently jerked from genre to genre. That film is "The Girl in the Cafe" and here's my review at Netflix:

There were 2 very distinct parts to this film, thus a 2 pt review.

Pt 1: Quirky, smart dialogue between the 2 leads. Genuinely fun to watch their thoughtful, typically English interactions. Shades of the stilted tension between Hopkins and Thompson in "The Remains of the Day", but so much the funnier. Winsome characters have the viewer wanting the best for them. Great cinematography and subdued acting. 4 stars.

Pt 2: Transition to Iceland. What was a romantic film becomes a moralizing preachfest, warning the viewer of the perils of "extreme poverty" at least 3 times. What was probably a well-intentioned revelry for old men to remember the young man's dreams of making a real difference, becomes ridiculous in its heavy-handed (and frankly, coldly rendered) statistical dialogues. Gina rails about the heart of the matter, yet her acting is strangely divorced from real passion. Without spoiling the revelations, it seemed to me that if Gina truly went through the experiences revealed later, that character would act quite differently. Yet, to the writers of this film, it was more important to impart to the viewer the full and well-enunciated statistics regarding the hard go of it among the world's poor. This was the entirely wrong way to present the material. It turned off both my wife and me, who otherwise might have felt sympathetic to a more careful plea. Gina's impetuous and impolite confrontations were excruciating. A guest knows her place. And the response of the bigwigs is laughable. People at that level of experience are not so simply motivated by such foolishness. A childlike plea should not be confused with a foolish one. Gina's were the latter.

In a word, we felt duped. We rented a romantic film and instead received a diatribe jacketed by a thin romance. Pt 2 receives 0 stars and since it's the bulk of the film, it brings my overall review to a single star. Watch the first part if you desire, then return the film once they board the plane to Iceland.