Memories of a Marriage; My Twentieth Century

Memories of a Marriage (originally titled Waltzing Regitze) is a powerful tale, brimful of humanity, that chronicles the marriage of Karl Aage (Frits Helmuth) and his wife Regitze (Ghita Norby). The film opens with a garden party to which the elderly Karl and Regitze have invited old friends. As the people eat, talk, and dance, a brooding Karl reflects on earlier moments from his many-faceted marriage. In flashback, we see a young Karl (Michael Helmuth) and Regitze (Rikke Bendsen) meet, fall in love, and become the target for Regitze's mother (who first insists that they marry, and later demands that their son John be baptized). When Regitze's mother takes to her bed in a hunger strike, the couple bands together against the cronies that daily appear at their doorstep with new tidings of the woman's declining health. The episode is hilarious, but rings quite true, which is Memories of a Marriage's great strength: the film takes standard situations and inventively casts them into new molds while keeping a careful eye on the fine line between pleasing an audience and remaining true to life. Like life, the episodes which spring to the aging Karl's mind are a rich mix of humor, compassion, selfishness, generosity, and tragedy. Karl, the introvert, can recall a night when Regitze freely danced and boozed with local military men while Karl stared on enraged (but psychologically powerless to intervene)--and he still feels the deep pangs of jealously decades later. An Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film, and winner of numerous awards elsewhere, Memories of a Marriage is a remarkably human film that doesn't play dice with our race's foibles, but rather lovingly examines them with sympathy, empathy, and constant care. Highly recommended. My Twentieth Century, winner of the Camera D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, also graced many critic's top ten lists as one of the best films of the year. Along with the Bermuda Triangle, the Loch Ness Monster, and Bigfoot, however; the critical success of My Twentieth Century has to rank as one of the more challenging mysteries of our time. First time writer/director Ildiko Enyedi initially gets good mileage out of the black and white filming of Europe near the turn of the century. It is an age of invention and light (Edison is a minor character in the film). It is also an age, apparently, in which "stars" (the celestial kind) talk to one another, monkeys reflect on life in the jungle, and dogs traverse entire continents out of sheer curiosity. Unlikely as these events might sound, however, they are far more interesting than the main story, which has a pair of identical twins named Dora and Lili (played by Dorota Segda) who are separated in childhood, growing up along rather divergent paths. Lili becomes a bomb throwing revolutionary, while Dora leans toward partying and manhunting. Their paths cross when they both sleep with the same man (Oleg Yankovsky). We haven't the slightest clue what galvanizes Dora, Lili, or the unnamed man in any of their actions, and we are forced to endure the exceptionally irritating soundtrack of Dora's non-speaking codas to everything she says--a series of supposedly coquettish mewlings, which sound like chalk on a blackboard. As far as I'm concerned, My Twentieth Century is just another example of the let-us-now-praise-incomprehensible-films syndrome which affects insecure film critics in a kind of domino fashion. But you can bank on this--patrons will turn this one off after the first half hour. Not recommended. (R. Pitman)