krebstar

I think that the film was o.k. but because the film's plot was like a mixture of Kramer vs. Kramer and Rain Man, I did not see anything new to make me excited. The acting of Sean Penn and Michelle Pfeifer was very well fitting but the child's role and her acting was what disturbed me most. She is said to be 7 years old and Sam's mental age is also said to be 7 but how come the little girl can act like a 30 year-old grown up? She is so much grown up that it feels she can even look after his father but it was so unrealistic to portray a 7 year-old as an extremely mature girl.

Also the film was far too long. It could have made its statement in 2 hours as well. There was too much subthemes like the problematic lawyer (yes i know it was important for the well-being of the plot but from time to time it made me lose the main theme), the never-going-out neighbour. But these are also not very much elaborated either. It was as if all of those plots were loosely fitted to the main plot to underline the statement of `all you need is love to raise a child`. 5/10 and that's for the good performances of Sean,Michelle and Dianne Wiest.

quoting from Philippe Moins and Jan Temmerman's book called a painter-filmmaker's journey:

after `chromophobia`'s narrative lead with drums beating, `Sirene` looks like a much less linear, more meandering, atmospheric and poetic film, even if the context to which it refers has links with society and its defects... everything here is more nervous, faltering with black edges, much like the pteranodons which dominate the scene with their heavy flight... the only notable presence, a little fisherman, brings back nothing but fish-skeletons in his baskets, and the entire city, with its cranes and its mooring cables, appears like a pile of nets and fish-bones, carcass of a declining industrial universe... as an idyll between eerie representations (a bow ofa ship and a siren), `sirene` was perceived as an early denouncement of the degradation of the environment. today, the film comes to us both as a poem dedicated to freedom and as a sarcastic vision of the order imposed by human society.

ok i should admit i liked the first 10-15 minutes of the film. it seemed to have very much to tell.. but after it with the darth vader joke and all that stuff it started to stink. the jokes became cheaper and cheaper and i found myself trying to stop yawning. how can such a meaningless film be shown on a festival? i know that there are far more better spanish films than this one. so if this was your first spanish movie, dont ever get to think that the rest is like this!