THE GIRL AND DEATH (Jos Stelling 2012)

Jos Stelling: THE GIRL AND DEATH 2012)

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LEONID BICHEVIN AND SYLVIA HOEKS IN THE GIRL AND DEATH

Prepare to swoon

Dutch director Jos Stelling's The Girl and Death is an opera, not a movie, but without any singing to speak of. A couple of actors playing the same lead character at different ages sing bits of a Russian lullaby, but that hardly counts. The sets and costumes, the location, and the cinematography are gorgeous. The two main leads are easy on the eyes too. Dutch actress Sylvia Hoeks, playing Elise, a kept woman with TB, looks like the young Michelle Pfeiffer, and Russian heartthrob Leonid Bichevin as Nicolai, a young Russian on his way from Moscow to Paris to study medicine who sees her in a hotel near Leipzig and falls madly in love for no good reason, is as cute and winsome as Anthony Perkins. But two hours of this is a bit much, given the hopelessness and dreaminess and lack of real dialogue or real action. But when Elise and Nicolai do talk, it's in French, which is sweet.

If you take it as opera, you aren't surprised with the cliches, a young man falling in love with a prostitute (Elise is essentially that, kept by a rich fake count -- "Der Graf," German actor Dieter Hallervorden -- who owns her and the hotel and everything and everybody in it), and a doomed love affair involving a pretty young woman with tuberculosis. Or the cruelty of the mean count, who beats Elise, and has Nicolai so severely beaten he has a limp -- or does off and on, when Bichevin and Sergey Makovetskiy, "Old Nicolai," in the cliché frame tale, remember to. There's also a "Grand Budapest Hotel" feel, only with haze and candlelight à la the Kubrick of Barry Lyndon instead of Wes Anderson, and that seems a refreshing variation at first. But after a while everything is more stifling than refreshing. Is this place a hotel or a whorehouse? Or is it "Hotel California," since nobody -- except Nicolai -- cam ever leave? It isn't a real hotel, not even a Grand Budapest one. It's at the same time a snooty hotel that could be a spa, a maison de passe, and gambling house. But mainly it's an opera set. (The action, which takes place in the operatically appropriate late nineteenth century, was actually filmed in a abandoned hotel/sanatorium Schloss in Tannenfeld, Thuringia, formerly East Germany.)

Nicolai is all agog on his first visit to the creepy hotel, with its stiff German clerk who, true to Russell Lynes' classic book, Snobs, is as utterly snooty as the bellhop is catatonic. The minute Nicolai sees Elise he's -- well, you uknow. The young Russian keeps extending his stay another day hoping to get close to her, but his go-between Nina (Renata Litvinova), a conveniently Russian older prostitut,e warns him, while arranging a 'tryst' with Elise in Room 15, that it's not going to work. And he doesn't even go. We're nicely teased here. Nicolai leaves, off to Paris, and comes back "a few years later," looking a bit better off and in a carriage instead of on foot. This when he gets the bad beating, and the repetitiousness and hopelessness of the action begin to cloy.

Nicolai's third visit has him wearing a fancy mustache that looks painted on, while the count and all his cronies are more artificial too (and more operatic), dressed in 18th-century costume as for a masked ball. Except there's no ball, only the Chopin piano music that permeates the movie, and everybody sitting around ready to zone out -- or play cards, as needed. On each of Nicolai's visits he plays a card match with the count. This time Nicolai is not only a doctor coming in from Moscow, but also trained as a card shark, prepared to get back at the count for an earlier humiliation at the gambling table. And he humiliates Elise, and throws all the money he's won up in the air.

This is the kind of abrupt shift of emotion you get in melodrama: but we know Nicolai will never forget Elise. I won't give away what happens to Old Nicolai when he revisits the now long-deserted, Miss Havisham's house-like hotel, and goes up to Room 15. It's really rather creepy. But it would all be so much better and make so much more emotional sense if there were not just the wall-to-wall Chopin, but arias instead.

The Girl and Death/Het Meisje en de Dood, 126 mins., a Dutch-German-Russian co-production, was honored as Best Feature at the Netherlands Film Festival, Aug. 2012. It showed at a handful of other fests and opened theatrically in the Netherlands, Germany, and Russia. It gets a limited US theatrical release 25 April 2014.