This is definitely an art house movie. It will not draw hordes of adolescents looking for raw sex and graphic violence. But it's not a cheesy, slapdash, black-and-white, improvised exercise in egotism either. Whatever it is, it's been constructed with lavish care.
Children, average age about ten, I would guess, enact myths and (maybe) some real historical events from Western history. It begins with part of the familiar text from Genesis -- Adam and Eve and Lucifer and the apple.
Then it switched from the Bible to something a little tougher, an enactment of certain events in Greek history involving a boy named Cimon and somebody named Crispos. I only recognized the name of Miltiades and that only cropped up once in a while.
A slow switch to what the title tells us is "Byzantium." I'm glad there was such a title otherwise I'd have been utterly lost. Two kids, Tancred and Isaura, now seem to be in love, at least as far as I could make out. In my ignorance, I could only associate the boy's name with one of those operas that never get produced.
Before I knew it, they were dealing with Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer/astrologist/mathematician. I learned two things about him that I hadn't known. He gave political advice based on the stars, and his mother was imprisoned for witchcraft. Good. I mean, good that I learned something, not good that his mother was a witch.
Vorkapich to the French Revolution, by which time there is little trace left of mythos and a lot more of then-current events.
That was a bit more than half-way through, about as far as I could get.
You may get a lot farther, depending on your taste for highly stylized enactment of mythical and real events by preadolescent children. The kids don't really have to act. It's as if they'd been given directions to speak softly or whisper, to move slowly, to assume strange postures, and never ever to giggle or look at the camera.
Despite the ambitious subject matter, we're not talking epic film here. The budget must have been small but there's still a lot of talent behind the camera. The compositions, arty though they may be, are appealing to the eye. The production designer deserves a medal for making so much out of so little. The very texture of the walls sings. Wardrobe is splendidly done, and the make up is even better than anything I've seen in Polk Gulch on Halloween night. That's saying a lot.
I'm just not sure I see the point, though. Why children? For the Garden of Eden, okay -- but the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror? How about goats next? And, for my benighted mind, the agenda was too ambitious. If I KNEW the events already, I'd have been able to follow the story. But, man, if your memory is blank or even hazy, you're in serious trouble.
Still, though the conception might be flawed, I give the writer and director bonus points for being willing to take such a major chance, and to invest the effort with what was clearly a lot of love. It's not the kind of production that results from some half-gassed bull session that revolves around a couple of bottles of tokay -- and it's certainly not a joke.
Children, average age about ten, I would guess, enact myths and (maybe) some real historical events from Western history. It begins with part of the familiar text from Genesis -- Adam and Eve and Lucifer and the apple.
Then it switched from the Bible to something a little tougher, an enactment of certain events in Greek history involving a boy named Cimon and somebody named Crispos. I only recognized the name of Miltiades and that only cropped up once in a while.
A slow switch to what the title tells us is "Byzantium." I'm glad there was such a title otherwise I'd have been utterly lost. Two kids, Tancred and Isaura, now seem to be in love, at least as far as I could make out. In my ignorance, I could only associate the boy's name with one of those operas that never get produced.
Before I knew it, they were dealing with Johannes Kepler, the German astronomer/astrologist/mathematician. I learned two things about him that I hadn't known. He gave political advice based on the stars, and his mother was imprisoned for witchcraft. Good. I mean, good that I learned something, not good that his mother was a witch.
Vorkapich to the French Revolution, by which time there is little trace left of mythos and a lot more of then-current events.
That was a bit more than half-way through, about as far as I could get.
You may get a lot farther, depending on your taste for highly stylized enactment of mythical and real events by preadolescent children. The kids don't really have to act. It's as if they'd been given directions to speak softly or whisper, to move slowly, to assume strange postures, and never ever to giggle or look at the camera.
Despite the ambitious subject matter, we're not talking epic film here. The budget must have been small but there's still a lot of talent behind the camera. The compositions, arty though they may be, are appealing to the eye. The production designer deserves a medal for making so much out of so little. The very texture of the walls sings. Wardrobe is splendidly done, and the make up is even better than anything I've seen in Polk Gulch on Halloween night. That's saying a lot.
I'm just not sure I see the point, though. Why children? For the Garden of Eden, okay -- but the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror? How about goats next? And, for my benighted mind, the agenda was too ambitious. If I KNEW the events already, I'd have been able to follow the story. But, man, if your memory is blank or even hazy, you're in serious trouble.
Still, though the conception might be flawed, I give the writer and director bonus points for being willing to take such a major chance, and to invest the effort with what was clearly a lot of love. It's not the kind of production that results from some half-gassed bull session that revolves around a couple of bottles of tokay -- and it's certainly not a joke.