Belle Epoque (1992)
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Belle Epoque Movie Review
Belle Epoque is a 1992 Spanish comedy film directed by Fernando Trueba and starring Jorge Stanz and Penelope Cruz. It’s a fun, but implausible farce.
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“What I’ve joined on Earth in heaven
not even God can separate!“
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It follows a man who escapes imprisonment during the thirties and settles to live in one kind old man’s house. But then his four daughters arrive and he has sex with each one of them and has to choose just one. Yes, needless to say, this is a very implausible film in its every sequence. Nothing made sense here and nothing could really happen in real life. And I know it’s a comedy, but this was too much nonetheless.
But that, on the other hand, made it quite entertaining and this farce is certainly very fun, light and charming in its own right. It has that very light tone to it that I really dug up and in particular the naive characters and some fun character interactions made it a cute comedy, if not particularly funny as only a couple of scenes are truly amusing.
Fernando as this very handsome man who’s literally a boy toy is a lot of fun as this not particularly standard protagonist and when you think about it all four of these women used him sexually which was an interesting change in the usual sex dynamic for these movies. Penelope Cruz is the most likable of the four and very endearing, but I did truly appreciate the lesbian daughter and how that cross-dressing sex scene felt very unique and progressive for its time.
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Belle Epoque isn’t particularly well directed by Fernando Trueba nor is the acting truly remarkable. All of them did a solid job, but the roles themselves are too one-note to make a bigger impact. The dialogue and situational humor are solid and I liked the look and the sound of the movie, but still nothing of substance is present here and it gets repetitive in its structure. It’s fun, but overly rehashed near the end. It did not thus deserve its Oscar and some of those Asian movies should have gotten it that year, particularly ‘The Scent of Green Papaya’.
Only Spaniards could make such a sexually charged farce that is certainly Belle Epoque. It’s a very entertaining, charming movie in its own right which has its amusing comedic situations and is memorable in its fun characters, but it’s also implausible and simply too silly in most of its plot points.
