Between Strangers Rating: Release Date: 13 January, 2004 Retail Price: $7.98 OUR Price: $7.98 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Malcolm McDowell Sophia Loren Pete Postlethwaite Klaus Maria Brandauer Complete Cast (11 total)

Between Strangers Reviews

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There are moments of truth that can only be shared between strangers
As the trailer for "Between Strangers" explain it, this is the story of a cellist, a photographer, and an artist, each of whom is haunted by a memory and each is harboring a secret. Set in Toronto, we watch as layer by layer these secrets are revealed, and the three women are spurred by their individual confrontations to make decisions that will bring them, for a moment, at the same time and place. It is not that the three storylines in writer-director Edoardo Ponti's film fit together, but more like there was really not enough with any one of the three to justify being the basis for an entire film.

Catherine (Deborah Kara Unger) plays the cello but is distracted by the reappearance of her father (Malcolm McDowell), who apparently did something horrible to her mother many years ago and is now back from, we assume, prison. Having abandoned her own child and apparently ready to do the same to her music career, Catherine is carrying a gun and needs to have a talk with her father. The photographer is Natalia Bauer (Mira Sorvino), the daughter of a famous photographer (Klaus Maria Brandauer). One of her photographs of a child in war torn Angola has been selected for "TIME" magazine and her first cover shot. But Natalia is haunted by not knowing what happened to the child in the photograph. Then there is Olivia (Sophia Loren), whose husband (Pete Postlethwaite) disapproves of her sketching things that come to her in her dreams.

It is hard to complain about any film that has Sophie Loren in it, but chances are at the end of "Between Strangers" you will be more depressed than you would like to be given the cast. The common element that emerges beyond the haunted secret bits is that the life of each woman is being harmed by a man in her life. The mere presence of Catherine's father is enough to distract her from her entire life, Natalia's father has the itinerary for the rest of her life planned out, and Olivia's husband turns everything she does into an opportunity to chastise or ridicule her. Only Catherine's father is not an ongoing threat, but she cannot wrap her mind around that idea so that fact does not matter, while the other two apparently finally reached the breaking point with their relationships. The performances here are fine, and there are a couple of emotional moments courtesy of Loren, but it is the plots that are rather pedestrian and which make this film less than satisfying all things considered.

Sophia Loren in "Between Strangers"
I found this to be a very experimental and unusual
concept for a drama. It's always a visual treat to see a
fine performance from Sophia Loren. Her dramatic range
has expanded in her later years, lending pathos to a film
which features frankly depressing subject matter. While
the three protagonists escape their circumstantial and
unfulfilled lives rooted in unhappy relationships with their
fathers or spouses, that escape doesn't occur until the
very very end of the drama, painting the experience in very
gloomy colors. The concept of the three parallel lives is an
interesting one and I wondered throughout if the director,
Edoardo Ponti might be the now adult son of Sophia Loren.
I'm sure he's some relationship to Carlo Ponti. I enjoyed
Between Strangers, but it wasn't thrilling.

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