An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since there was a decent cast involved and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. It was another movie I watched while I didn’t know anything about the story which remains one of my favorite way to watch movies, even if it might seem odd. Especially in this case as it turned out to be quite fascinating. Unfortunately, even though the material itself was quite strong, I’m afraid the movie itself was not great though. First of all, there was the back-and-forth in time. Sure, it made sense narratively speaking to tell the story of Martin as an adult and showing some flashbacks of his youth with Dovidl but it is still a rather worthless gimmick and, even in this case, it didn’t mean that this approach was really satisfying. However, a bigger issue was how they rather poorly handled the material and especially Martin and Dovidl. Basically, it was a story about traumatic loss and how 2 completely different individuals handled this trauma. To make Martin the main character was, again, narratively speaking a logical choice but they completely failed to make him interesting enough. Indeed, they reduced him to a rather talentless boring guy who seemed jealous of his (adopted) brother (the way they told at the end that his wife actually slept with Dovidl was especially humiliating and completely unnecessary). With Dovidl, it wasn’t much better. Indeed, they constantly reduced him to a selfish egocentric genius because he seemingly chose to drop also his surrogate British family after already losing his biological Polish family. Why the guy did leave them suddenly and why didn’t he reach out to them to all these years, that was the obsessive argument made by this movie. However, like I said before, the whole point of this tale was the traumatic experience they both had, explaining their weird erratic behavior, and this movie completely failed to show that. The only moment when you could finally feel it was when they played this magnificent violent music, some of the most beautiful violin music I have ever heard. Anyway, to conclude, in spite of its flaws, it was still an interesting story and I think it is worth a look. 

6/10