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Strangely reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, Philip Haas’s Up at the Villa is a similarly insulated psychosexual drama detached from the larger world yet with consequnces well beyond itself. As with Kubrick’s final masterpiece, Up at the Villa is constructed around a self-centered character whose insecurities about marriage set a disastrous chain of events into motion. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Mary Panton, a comely Englishwoman staying at a villa in Florence, Italy, in the late 1930s. Sheltered by the goodwill of the British and American community there, Mary–with little money and few prospects for survival outside marriage–dithers over her uncertain destiny and dreams of independence.
Based on a novella by W. Somerset Maugham, Up At the Villa finds Mary forced to take charge of her life after a one-night stand with an Austrian immigrant (Jeremy Davies) leads to tragedy. Sean Penn plays a cavalier American playboy who helps her out in the nightmarish aftermath. Both he and Thomas approach Haas’s artful film noir with intentionally mannered performances that blur the line between internal and external experience. The result is a kind of midnight journey through minefields of the subconscious.
Still, the film is not without weaknesses: getting a fix on Penn’s roughly sketched character, for instance, proves unsatisfying given his cliched roguishness. And Haas seems to be plucking derivative ideas from everywhere: there’s a strange stretch in the second act in which he goes out of his way to make a Hitchcockian film that really does look and sound like a Hitchcock film. While the result is eerie, you have to wonder why Haas would be so blunt about it. –Tom Keogh
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Up at the Villa was genial! You have to synod this movie! A appalling performance by Kristin Scott Thomas & Sean Penn make Up at the Villa a “want to cognize” movie!
The dazzling cast includes Kristin Scott Thomas, Sean Penn, Anne Bancroft, James Fox, Jeremy Davies. This cast just make Up at the Villa the more wondrous!