ANTONIA'S LINE Movie Review

Marleen Gorris's exquisite recounting of the loves and trials of several generations of women in a rural village in the Netherlands has been nearly as popular with audiences as it has been with critics. Antonia's Line unfolds in a series of flashbacks that gently cascade through the memory of the now-90-year-old Antonia (the wonderful Willeke van Ammelrooy) who tells us in her narration that this is the day on which she will die. Though the film has been misread in some quarters as an idealized vision of a world of women in which men are unnecessary, Antonia's Line is in fact far from that simplistic. It presents a universe in which men and women have made a kind of uneasy peace with each other, and the film goes so far as to imagine a community in which sexuality in all its incarnations is a genuinely liberating force rather than a guilt-inducing need for which a steep price must be paid. Simply but elegantly photographed and directed, with a particularly evocative score by Ilona Sekacz, Antonia's Line is one of those small surprises that is often referred to—justifiably in this case—as a gem. It won the 1995 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

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1995 (R) 102m/C NL Willeke Van Ammelrooy, Els Dottermans, Veerle Van Overloop, Thyrza Ravesteijn, Jan Decleir, Mil Seghers, Jan Steen, Marina De Graaf; D: Marleen Gorris; W: Marleen Gorris; C: Willy Stassen; M: Ilona Seckaz. Academy Awards ‘95: Best Foreign Film: Nominations: British Academy Awards ‘96: Best Foreign Film. VHS BMG