Third Person

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This movie is contrived without even succeeding in doing that convincingly. It exudes clichés. When a character is an author or a successful painter immediately I smell clichés. To have them as major characters is hackneyed in the extreme. The movie is full of holes and pretends to be mysterious where it is merely indulging in pretentious obfuscation. When the obnoxious American whines about people not speaking English in Italy it rings true to an extent but as a scene in a movie, it comes over a clumsy and somewhat gauche. When the Roma woman says "Do you think I am too stupid to speak English?" I cringed because it seems the script writer subconsciously at least, connected not being good at English with being stupid. Evidently it was all right for the American not to be able to speak Italian. I hate that attitude and even though it happens in life, it put me in a bad frame of mind about the screenplay. That put me in a bad mood all right and I found the American's character less than charming. When this Scott (I think) whined that the bar was called the Americano so therefore they should speak English, I immediately thought that the staff of Italian restaurants all over the world don't automatically speak Italian.. shudder. In fact none of the characters except for the Roma were in the least likable. Its hard to like a movie when you find the characters charmless. Liam Neeson also exuded a comprehensive charmless-ness. The Italian scenes were riddled with clichés right down to the predictable little Fiats that I knew would be coming. The parallel stories had no interweaving whatsoever and one wonders why you would pick some unconnected boring stories at random and present them for no apparent reason. I am visiting Rome at Christmas and this movie nearly put me off going. There was no romance extracted from Paris either. It was straight out boring. Just putting Rome and Paris in a movie does not automatically give it an air of romance. I didn't see any beautiful photography either. It looked very mundane. How you can make Paris and Rome look so prosaic in a film is utterly beyond me. Other cringe-worthy elements included the scene where Neeson tricks the woman into disrobing and then locks her out of the room without a key. It was excruciating and had all the panache of an adolescent prank. Not the character's prank but the screenwriter's prank and the director's prank. The stories were unrelated and had gaps so wide you could sail the Titanic through them. I was only fascinated by wondering how much worse the film was going to get and the mechanics of its inexorable deterioration; though actually it started badly in the first place. I wonder throughout the film how exactly the next scene would be worse. That was the only reason I did not walk out. There was nothing artistic about Third Person; it was masquerading as an arty film but it only succeeded in being gauche and pretentious. It was produced by a company called Highway 61 and there was an obvious reference to Bob Dylan's Tangled up in Blue when the lady bends to tie the laces of Neeson's shoe. But it lacked the poignancy of the Dylan song; it just came over as obvious and clumsy like everything about this gauche and pretentious movie.

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source: Third Person