Antonia’s Line (1995)
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Antonia’s Line Movie Review
Antonia’s Line is a 1995 Dutch historical film directed by Marleen Gorris. It’s a solid, effective and interesting, but ultimately overly flawed flick.
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“The proverb is wrong.
Time does not heal all wounds.
It merely softens the pain and blurs the memories“
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The film follows a group of women following WWII as they pursue their dreams as well as their relationships with various men and women. I liked this film in particular for being very feminist, aggressively so, but in a good way this time around. It shows particularly well the importance of lesbianism and how some women don’t need men and how lesbian love is beautiful.
That was very progressive for the nineties and although the movie was borderline anti-men at times, for the most part it was respectably done. I appreciated these women for all having different goals in life and passions and that was great to witness. The film was directed by a woman who’s clearly a feminist and thus in its heart this is a woman’s picture for all the women out there as an outcry for them to pursue their dreams and in that way it more than succeeds.
But I wanted much better character development. Well, the characterization is actually solid, but the movie again makes the fatal mistake of having so many characters and so many stories and subplots that most get really too little screen time to make a proper impact. The acting and characters are both fine, but never great because of that issue.
Yes, Antonia’s Line is just a solid movie. Whatever great it does is seriously offset by those downright frustrating problems that for some unbeknownst reason to me almost all 90s foreign Oscar winners share and those are: too many characters, rushed or bad pacing and a structure that I simply dislike which is an epic span of years or the use of narration as a framing device.
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Now admittedly, Antonia’s Line ended up being better than the aforementioned bunch of movies, but still not by much and I was frustrated as I could see the greatness in its dialogue and the forcefulness of its modern, progressive ideas at its core that I wanted much more from it. It’s just solid unfortunately.
Antonia’s Line succeeds as a forceful, progressive and very interesting feminist film which gives us the female perspective on life so well through many interesting characters and their relationships. But, as is usual for 90s foreign Oscar winners, it’s terribly paced, framed badly with too much narration and it has too many characters and stories that most do not get enough proper attention. It’s thus just a solid film, but it had the potential to be so much better.
