Truly Dreadful Film

Sadly Over-hyped

Expected more

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

A vintage novel with a "national treasure" quality about it, and a movie version of it directed by Liv Ullman, Norway's passionate prodigy: Kristen Lavransdatter has an emblematic quality, like a national-theatre production attended by royalty.Sadly, the production does not quite live up to its own image: the star-crossed lovers more closely resemble a pedophile and his prey, or a sleazy playboy and his schoolgirl pick-up, than a knight and his lady. The wild passion at the heart of the picture would be a fizzle at a Christian am-dram camp.The big landowner, Kristen's dad, lives in a wretched shack with a couple of nags in the yard --- and his much older wife is nursing an age-old guilt, too. Basically, this whole tale is about guilt, which is a tedious theme, especially strung out for nearly three hours, and without even a few seconds of the forbidden sex being depicted, or skin being shown, which for a Scandinavian picture is, well, bewildering.Liv dutifully delivers her central, as-it-were feminist message: that daughters should always be allowed to shag whomever they wish, wherever, and whenever they choose, and probably at just about any age.Kristen fancied her childhood playmate, Arne, but was betrothed to Simon. A neighbour tries to rape her, but she dings him on the head with a heavy stone, deranging him sufficiently that in a rage he kills Arne. While attending a convent in Oslo (!) she takes a fancy to His Lordship, a rake who has wrecked the lives of many a dame, and is immediately hot to jump her. Ah, but he knows a trick or two with these schoolgirl virgins, and first lets her sleep the night in his lap while he strokes her hair ---- sure! After she's had a couple of lusty romps in the hay, Kristen may be racked by guilt, but she obeys her lust like a machine, and the devil take the hindmost. She's quite tickled when Mr Moneybags licks the hymen blood off her inner thigh, but that's it for the rampant sex as far as Ms. Ullman is concerned.Perhaps the weirdest moment in this theatrical-type movie is when Kristen watches her lover kill his other mistress of ten years, mother of six of his children, then marries him and falls adoringly into his arms in her father's bed. That's carrying Stepfordism to the Nth degree, in my opinion, and for most people in the audience, I think, rips the heroine away from normal and into the world of freaky Manson-girls.It's nice to know that the Norwegians treasure this picture, and believe its depiction of the medieval period, but out here in the wider world this film looks dated and Sunday schoolish. Even the art direction is overrated: the scenery is fairly impressive, but sparingly delivered, and the costumes out of a theatrical hire shop, and sometimes garishly coloured.Above all, this is a film about sexual desire and longing and rampant fulfilment, and for Kristen Lavransdatter not to depict any sexual activity at all is bordering on the perverted. This is a curiosity that is better left to the Norwegian board of education.

As an American of Norwegian ancestry I honestly approached this movie with an open mind. I was anxious to see how Norwegians lived in the 13th century. In a love story, it's vital to have actors who have chemistry on screen and make the audience feel their pain at not being able to be together. That did not happen in this movie. I simply could not get past the advanced age of all the actors. Talk about wrinkles! What made it worse was all those close up camera shots! Whoa! Back up the camera or use a filtered lens, please! The actor who played Kristen's love interest Erlend was 45 years old when the movie was made in 1995. Did people even live that long in the 13th century? Couldn't they find someone more visually appealing like Norwegian actor Dennis Storhoi (The 13th Warrior)? Even Simon, Kristen's betrothed who was cast by the wayside was younger and more appealing than Erlend. I was kind of turned off by the fact that a worn out, middle aged man was pursuing a much younger woman (although she looked about 10 years older than her character's age). I was unable to believe the passion between them because of their huge age difference. In contrast, the actress who played Erlend's former love interest Eline was a very beautiful actress closer in age to Erlend, and she had very little screen time, yet the actress who played Kristen was very, very plain and in virtually every scene. Once I saw Eline on the screen, I could not imagine that Erlend would leave such a beautiful woman for the plain, uninteresting farm girl Kristen. Another strange thing was the creepy grin that Erlend's sidekick Ulv always had on his face. He reminded me of a pervert. My next complaint is that the story moves along at a snail's pace at three hours. This story could have easily wrapped up in only one hour. It is claimed that at the time this movie was released in Norway, half the country went to see it. I wish I knew how many Norwegian were as disappointed as I after they paid money to see it. While I understand that there are Norwegians who loved this movie and are very proud of their hometown girl, director Liv Ullmann, they are surely a bit biased. They can't expect everyone else to share their passion for this waste of time. Liv claims to have spent one year preparing for this movie. It certainly doesn't show. Maybe she should have spend a bigger part of that year auditioning better actors instead of clearing out the local retirement home at the last minute before everyone died. This was a very disappointing film and watching grass grow may prove to be a faster and more rewarding endeavor if you have a lot of extra time on your hands.

A beautifully directed, well acted, and consistently faithful adaptation of the first of Sigrid Undset's Nobel Prize-winning novels about her fourteenth-century fictitious heroine, Kristin Lavransdatter. The movie perfectly captures the genius of the novel(s), the external and internal drama of a young woman's struggle with pride and sin, her rebellion against the good and yet her longing for it. Kristin's religious milieu, sympathetically but not sentimentally portrayed in the movie, forms a powerful backdrop against which this drama plays out. My only regret is that they did not make sequels out of the second and third Lavransdatter novels to complete the trilogy, since, indeed, the ending of the movie and of the first novel leave you hungering for more.

I absolutely agree with your assessment, ladyscarlet18705 and can't for the life of me fathom the low score that this film has garnered.LIV ULMANN and UNDSET have done a marvelous job adapting the novel to the screen. The script is sensational, melding Middle-Age pagan beliefs with an awareness of supernatural powers lording over men's lives, an awareness of the hold unseen forces have over men's lives.The actors, esp. ELIZABETH MATHESON in the title role bring an honesty and such transparency in their performances -- the emotions are raw and heartfelt.SVEN NYKVIST's cinematography is superlative in every sense of the term and it succeeds in making alive even the most inanimate of objects, thus showing us that there may be life in all things. The movie almost seems like a WATERHOUSE painting come alive. It's the height of romanticism for a love story as grand and poignant as the mythical tale of the knight TRISTAN and the maiden ISEULT (ISOLDE).The most important, of course, is how ULMANN was able to show that each action in time will have its repercussions in the future. Each of these characters are bound by fate, by the will of unseen deities, and to a greater degree -- by their own free will, live down the consequences of their choices in life and here, most of these said choices revolve around emotional attachments to a beloved, attachments that may erode in time. Thus, the core of the relationship between two people is examined, and the betrayals and regrets that come once love is gone and a new one has come to take its place are shown to be part of the cycle, the cycle that is love -- a force as synonymous with birth, healing, and life as it is with destruction.