Correspondence (2016)

hyped garbage

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Maybe this is a movie for necrophilic melancholics, but there is next to no joy in it. If you like drama and tragedy it may be for you. Otherwise you shouldn't waste your time. I didn't even understand the idea of the protagonist to drag out the mourning of his love. Sad!

Dear Amy, This is Ed writing from the dead. (LOL)You are now reading my final letter to you. I am not writing to you about the Higgs Boson or numerical orbit integration. Instead, I am writing about the horrible film that has been made from our correspondence. It turns out that the filmmakers got our story wrong.The film titled "La Corrispondenza" (Correspondence) seeks to weave a sentimental story about an old man having an adulterous affair with a woman thirty years his younger. They carry on for six "beautiful" (ha ha) years. Then, when the old geezer dies, he leaves an endless stream of letters and videos to be delivered to you.In watching this film, I kept saying out loud to the screen, "Oh, please! Not another letter!" I feel as if I have a case of crabs coming on...not from studying my favorite supernova, Crab Nebula, but from having to endure my own letters and videos! I realize that I have been pretty nosy in interfering with your life. I pried into your personal background when your inept driving took the life of your father. I coerced you into giving up a successful career as a stunt woman in films (screen name: Kamikaze) to become a student of astrophysics. I prodded you into writing a thesis called "From Gas, Stars to Supernovas: A Dialogue With Dead Stars," instead of allowing you to select your own topic.The filmmakers took an arty approach to our love affair. It was especially the "flawed" sculpture of you that I found unbearably pretentious. It never occurred to the filmmakers that all of the letters and videos were fake and that I'm still alive, having pulled off the hoax of the century.Please meet me at "our" favorite spot on Borso Ventoso.See you on the island! Love, Ed (Professor Edward Phoerum, as in "theorem")

Writer/Director Giuseppe Tornatore ('Cinema Paradiso', 'The Legend of 1900', 'The Best Offer', 'Everybody's Fine') has created a love song to Italy, science, astronomy, writing as an art form, communication and that fragile love between an older professor and a student. In other's hands this combination may come saccharine and a silly treatise on life and whether we die or become part of the universe spirit. Tornatore makes it a sensitive and delicate poem of a film.Amy Ryan (Olga Kurylenko), a young student and stunt woman for films and Ed Phoerum (Jeremy Irons), a highly respected astrophysicist have an affair for 6 years, primarily an affair over distance. When Ed goes out of town, both of them keep in touch by text and video chats. All seems well and carries a light touch of humor as well as longing until Amy discovers Ed died 2 days back due to cancer. But still she receives messages and gifts under the name of Ed. Amy meets Ed's family (Shauna Macdonald, Oscar Sanders) and gradually assimilates with them. She ceases to feel lonely with the frequent input of videos she receives at strange intervals but remains surprised about the mysterious messages and gifts. How Amy copes with her life and how is Ed texting and sending gifts even after his death forms is brought to a satisfying if over long conclusion to the film. Ed suggests that she will find another man and very briefly in the end Amy encounters an old acquaintance Jason (Simon Anthon Johns), suggesting that Ed's last prediction will be fulfilled. Tornatore's writing includes some wonderful information about the stars and the theories of their life span as well as other Astronomical insights and mixes these with love poems that are radiant as delivered by both Irons and Kurylenko. Though the film opens with a passionate love scene we both hear in darkness and eventually see as the film progresses, the remainder of the film is a conversation via cell phone and video and for those of us who have problems with the obsession with those forms of interaction in today's society, Tornatore manages to soften the mechanical emptiness of their use.Ennio Morricone provides the musical score and Fabio Zamarion the exquisite photography of Italy, Scotland, and the UK. The film is in need of some editing but the spirit is there and Tornatore's little gem restores our faith that fine films are still being made.

Years and years ago, Pier Paolo Pasolini would have solved this 116 minutes film with one sentence: "Death does not mean a lack of communication; it is the impossibility of being understood." And while this concept (twisted, distorted, disfigured) still remains interesting enough, Tornatore's prolix (plain redundant right there in the middle) writing swings between borderline creepy and full-on cheesy.Among the tear-jerking treacle, his pseudo-philosophical, re-adjusted to the contingency, take on astronomy -- dead stars and all -- is accurate and poetic enough, and really the only element (almost) giving the movie an appearance of tightness, thickness and consistency in its back and forth, back and forth rhythm.