The House of Mirth

Confusing & boring. Inexplicable scenery shots. Slow. Virtue is rewarded with death. What you would expect with lots of crying & downtrodding. Hoo Ha!

This is an intelligent and surprising adaptation of Wharton's novel about the failure of Lily Bart to find a husband. Davies redistributes the caddishness of the men slightly and subtly rejigs the denouement. Gillian Anderson's Lily is a gorgeous flower requiring heavy fertilizing. It's the heartbreak of gardening writ large.

Painful and brutal but presented intelligently. Excellent all around cast as well.

hahaha yay gillian anderson shes my fav

"Besides his remarkable ability to render a profound sense of past in all his films, Davies can uncannily map out the emotions of his characters via his mise-en-scene." - Ed Gonzalez

This is a beautifully filmed and directed period drama with a great cast and a good story. However it is quite lengthy and the ending wasn't very satisfying.

Made five years after The Neon Bible it feels like a far more confident, assured piece of film-making, and is heartbreaking. Gillian's performance in this film is remarkable and the visuals are painterly.

Gillian Anderson was very good. A drawn out and heavy handed story about how virtue is sometimes rewarded with hardship. I disliked some of the directors random scenery segments. The period was beautifully shown. The story was engaging but ultimately unsatisfying. It relied too heavily on outdated conventions and old world sensibilities. There was a frequent lack of clarity about what was happening and why. Near the end it became increasingly confusing, and the ending was disappointing.

A Essência da Paixão estreava há 20 anos no Festival de Locarno. Já disse Scorsese que a sociedade nova-iorquina pintada pela Edith Warthon era mais violenta do que dos seus filmes de gangster, aqui não é diferente, com a usual maestria de Davies galgamos a pura essência de como a sociedade capitalista patriarcal excede em violência contra a mulher. Plus: Que elenco fabuloso! DVDRip no PirateBay.

Maybe 20th Century literature about high society is not for me

Well done and the story had me interested throughout. Kudos to Gillian Anderson especially.