leplatypus Another great movie with Minnie ! It's sad that she had a meteoric career because she really stood out.Here, she plays a surprising Jew girl in Britain at Victorian time. Even if her family is wealthy, the death of her father leads her to search for work. She gets it as a governess of a spoiled young girl leaving in a isolated island. During her stay, she would find love and participate in the invention of photography. Thus, there are a lot of ideas, emotions, feelings here that makes a fast, gripping movie. I think that this lonely place helps to maximize the tension, all above that the sets and costume are beautiful and for modern eyes of cities settlers, it looks fairy! As it's about leaving home, making a trip and dividing faiths, it's funny to notice that human always carry a luggage that is weightless and is the ultimate glue for people: the libido! Unaware of it, even when Minnie is locked in a tiny island for working and inventing photography, this pulsing has accompanied her, lurking and waiting for the perfect time to get out: it's not really surprising that the first takes are nude composition and having lost her dear father, Minnie falls in love with the only mature man.As her story is told with a lot of heart, fragility and truth, it leaves a warmly memory!

squareeyes This was slagged off in the Radio Times but I'd checked the viewer comments here and decided to watch it . My one main problem with this is Minnie Driver . She can't do restrained and repressed . It's not her . She's not Helena Bonham-Carter or Kristin Scott Thomas . The fragile English rose , she's not . Stillness doesn't suit her . When she lets rip at Tom Wilkinson she comes alive . Let's see some more of that kind of temperament in her performances . Apart from that it is a very well put together film although the wonderfulness of this Jewish woman alone in the Gentile world of the nineteenth century gets laid on with a trowel , somewhat . Nevertheless an interesting and unusual film .

Starlla34_98 I only watched this to see more of Jonathan Rhys Meyers work. I truly enjoyed this movie, it was beautiful. And the strange character played by JRM didn't disappoint me at all. It was educational as well. I found out some things about photography that I never know. This movie was great.

Keith F. Hatcher The story is not up to great things, oft told one way or another and smacking of Jane Austen romantic drama aspirations: a beautiful jewess of sephardi descent in 1830s London decides to take the job of governess to a little girl in a great big mansion supposedly on the Island of Skye, Inner Hebrides, Scotland (though I did glimpse a bit of Glencoe, Scottish mainland, and indeed what was definitely the beautiful Cuillins on Skye) where she falls in love with the master of the household, father of the little girl, and then the son falls in love with her. Well, that alone might have you wandering over to the next projection sala or just twiddling with the remote control, if it were not for certain other factors which may well be called redeeming, so good they are.Minnie Driver certainly looks the beautiful jewess, but her interpretation goes a bit awry at times, or even careers off the rails; her performance has ups and downs of feelings and passions which do not really make much sense. Better directing might well have produced better results from Ms. Driver, as well as the fact that the focussing of the story is very much a feministic appreciation, rather slanted perhaps, forgiveably so I am not so sure, rather as if Ms. Goldbacher herself was brought up on the aforementioned Jane Austen, as well as Daphné du Maurier, a touch of the Brontës, and she finally spiced it all up with some misgivings from D.H. Lawrence. The result is a confusion of desire and sex being mistaken for romantic love. But don't we all, anyway?The excellent photography and scenification makes up quite a lot for many of these pitfalls; the costumes and the settings of the interior of the house of such lucky landed-gentry is superb, as well as the scenes in London in the opening and closing parts of the film. This visual experience is greatly enhanced by the musical setting. Ed Shearmur has done an excellent job of creating his own `sephardi' music, helped by offerings from the Israeli singer, Ofra Haza. The music contributed greatly to the setting of scenes, ably supplying tone and atmosphere. Such that I feel one could enjoy this film solely for the photography, costumes and sets, and the music, and you could quite happily skip most of the story. It is not that the story is so bad, just that it is not anything special to write home to mother about, although she might well be the first to disagree.The Sephardi songs made me remember an old recording I have of some very beautiful melodies sung by Soledad Bravo on a CBS record maybe 20 years ago and which might be found on a Sony CD. The intepretation of these songs, sung in `ladino' (sometimes called judezmo) which is an archaic form of today's Spanish, is pretty authentic. Ladino is still used today by descendents of people thrown out of Spain during the `Inquisición', and now living in parts of Turkey (specifically I found it being spoken in Izmir), Bulgaria, Macedonia, Montenegro and the Croatia coast. Within Israel of course, this language is pretty frequent.