By EWAN McDONALD
(Herald rating: * * * )
Sweaty, candlelit melodrama, joyously trashy, designed to show off two buffed bodies. Have to confess that's not original but it sums this up so perfectly that it was worth borrowing.
The movie opens with Angelina Jolie telling why she's in a jail cell and
revealing, eventually, why she's been sentenced to death in a particularly nasty way. The story is set in Cuba, around 1900, so the filmmaker can show lots of scenes of Antonio Banderas with few or no clothes, as wealthy coffee-planter Luis Durand, who is waiting for his mail-order bride, Julia Russell (Jolie, ditto the bit about Banderas).
In the reverse of what we're told has happened to so many people who've entered internet romances, Durand is surprised to find Julia is not the plain woman in the photograph he holds. She sent the wrong photo because she did not want a man who was attracted only to her beauty. He has a confession, too: he owns the plantation and is not, as he said in his letters, a worker. He didn't want a gold-, or rather coffee-digger.
Luis believes her story. But Julia is not, and does not try to be, a nice woman. Luis is so lovestruck that he will follow her anywhere. Which, as you may guess without too much imagination (which you won't need for this movie anyway), is right into trouble.
Rental video, DVD: Today
• DVD features: movie (112min); theatrical trailers; commentary from writer/director Michael Cristopher; photo gallery; music video by Gloria Estefan, You Can't Walk Away From Love.
