A charming elderly Jewish writer who lives in a state of "permanent confusion" finds his vivid imagination becoming the bane of his existence in director Jan Schütte's adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer's richly textured short stories. Max Kohn (Otto Tausig) is an Australian émigré whose mind is constantly spinning. He's an accomplished author of short stories who lives in New York City and is so steeped in tradition that he still uses a typewriter. Despite the fact
that confirmed bachelor Max has a virtual harem of female admirers, he spends the majority of his free time with worrisome kindred soul Reisele (Rhea Perlman). It's during a trip to speak in nearby Hanover that Max begins editing his latest story -- a mischievous tale of a Miami retiree who embarks on a series of misadventures. Of course, it doesn't take Max long to lose himself in his own creation, and before he knows it, he's mixed up in two feverish romances and an unsolved murder. Upon snapping back to reality, Max begins to feel as if his own written word has begun to manifest itself. A meeting with world-weary former student Rosalie (Barbara Hershey), with whom he shares a mutual attraction, follows, and later while heading to Springfield for yet another speaking engagement Max discovers that he has misplaced his prepared speech. In the aftermath of that and various other mix-ups, Max decides to start writing a new story based on his recent adventures and featuring a protagonist named Harry -- a thinly veiled stand-in for the author himself. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
One of the best compliments to be paid a movie based on fiction is that it compels you to read other things by the author. Love Comes Lately is likely to elicit such a response.
Fear of intimacy trumps fear of death in Love Comes Lately, filmmaker Jan Schütte's plaintively effective merging of three Isaac Bashevis Singer short stories.
The idea's not terrible, and no filmmaker has bothered with Singer for years, but this movie chooses to reduce the author's soulfulness to mirrored tales of lonely, randy seniors, all of whom Tausig plays. In one sense, it's a disservice.
Love Comes Lately, a new English-language film from the German director Jan Schutte, has the good sense to begin with three very good short stories by the modern master Isaac Bashevis Singer.
A never less than astonishing procession of real and make-believe oddball characters joining one another for food or sex. A wildly buoyant tale of a geriatric imagination fired up on mental viagra.
A poignant valentine to the creativity of I.B. Singer's later years, with the pungent dialogue of the lively women coming directly from Singer's magic realism stories.
Schuttes combining of three separate stories serves only to spread Singer's thematic concerns too thin, thereby failing to achieve the richness of the original written material.
the director dodges the material's great potential pitfall: Kohn never comes off as a dirty old man, just one who genuinely likes the ladies and who lives by the hard-won insight that human connection is life's great buffer against despair.
While I found the blurring of reality and imagination thought provoking, and while I admire some of the more mundane humor, I simply could not get behind Max - a charactor who glides through the film as things happen all around him; more of a force that moves the plot along than an actual engaged charactor (fictional
or otherwise).
The women who drift in and out of Max's vision all do a very nice job supporting the film, especially Barbara Hershey, although I found Pena's performance just too polarized and predictable (hampered by the script, no doubt).
What this film tells about ageing is poignant and at the crux, but there's just too much sleight of hand to really make you feel for Max.
January 20, 2010
paul sandberg
Super Reviewer
Completa perda de tempo, um filme com um personagem egocentrista mala e um roteiro sem coerência que tenta unir três contos sem sucesso.
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