A passionate, decade-long romance between a carefree, peripatetic young woman of means and a working-class idealist is repeatedly put to the test in this handsome but unremarkable World War II drama from writer-director John Duigan (“Flirting,” “Sirens”). There are worse ways to spend two hours than watching beautiful people gallivanting across the picturesque European continent, but as eye-catching as “Head in the Clouds” is, neither the events that drive the too-familiar story nor the key players are all that inspiring. Duigan piles on the melodrama, but even the most obliging tissue-toters will likely be put off by the film’s conspicuous lack of originality and the surprising absence of chemistry between the romantic leads, real-life lovers Charlize Theron and Stuart Townsend.
Townsend plays Guy, the son of an Irish cop on scholarship at Cambridge. It’s there in 1933 that he meets Gilda Besse (Theron), an ethereal beauty with a devil-may-care attitude. Needless to say, Guy goes ga-ga over Gilda, and over the course of their long affair bears the myriad indignities she visits upon him with uncommon equanimity. Devotion is one thing, buy Guy truckles so easily to his amour’s will that he’s ultimately unable to carry his weight in what Duigan attempts to sell as a puissant pairing. The director attempts to level the balance of power in Paris, where Gilda has become a celebrated photographer, by introducing a third wheel in the form of a dynamic Spanish beauty named Mia (Penelope Cruz), who shares Guy’s sense of social responsibility as well as a burning desire for the increasingly irascible blonde bombshell. Somehow, the uxorious Guy manages to separate from Gilda and leave Paris with Mia to fight Franco’s fascist forces in Spain. Years later, he returns to the City of Lights to find that Gilda has taken a Nazi officer as a lover. Of course, Guy and Gilda have still got it bad for each other, setting the stage for the inevitable tragic denouement. Sniff. Sniff … somebody please pass the tissue.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 17, 2004. Read the original PDF.