Torrents of Spring

It may be nothing more than highbrow cotton candy, but watching Timothy Hutton fall in and out of love with two beautiful women (while at the same time falling in and out of his vague Middle European accent) is an experience not without some incidental pleasure, silly as it is. Jerzy Skolimowski directed the multi-national (i.

Stately period piece in the meticulous style of BARRY LYNDON (1975) - down to frequent shooting by candlelight - if done on a more intimate scale; actually the plot, adapted from a novel by Ivan Turgenev, is quite reminiscent of THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993). Still, it's not all solemnity and Skolimowski (who even appears, uncredited, in a brief but plum role) manages to insert his trademark irony and the odd visual touch on occasion!

This is an extremely amateurish, ham-handed film, with lousy accents, stilted dialogue, and a waste of the unconvincing Timothy Hutton as a disillusioned Russian nobleman (!!!)Valeria Golino is beautiful, but her character awfully two dimensional - and nobody could possibly believe Nastassja Kinski's hardboiled seductress.

This is a gorgeous movie. The photography is stunning.

Warning: spoilers follow"Torrents of Spring" is an HBO European, horse and carriage, costume drama from the late 1980's. Bought off of e-Bay for less than $7, it is an ex-rental VHS tape that immediately says something about the movie: the initial scenes show tape wear, indicating that the movie was watched for a few minutes and then quickly taken out of the VHS recorder/player and dumped back into its box.

*May Contain Spoilers*Timothy Hutton as Dimitri has great chemistry with both innocent Gemma (Valeria Golino) and bad girl Maria (Nastassja Kinski) in this lusciously filmed period drama. Even if I wasn't a Tim Hutton fan, the worst I could say about his performance is that he does have a bit of trouble with the Russian accent.