Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Pacionsbo Absolutely Fantastic

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Michael Neumann It may be nothing more than highbrow cotton candy, but watching Timothy Hutton fall in and out of love with two beautiful women (while at the same time falling in and out of his vague Middle European accent) is an experience not without some incidental pleasure, silly as it is. Jerzy Skolimowski directed the multi-national (i.e. badly dubbed) cast, led by Hutton as a 19th century Russian aristocrat who (talk about bad luck) loves and loses both Valeria Golino and Nastassia Kinski. One is passionate and beautiful, the other is beautiful and passionate, and it's difficult to feel sorry for Hutton's mortal anguish in choosing between them The film abruptly ends just when the plot is beginning to thicken, but who needs narrative integrity with such romantic coffee table scenery, of ruined abbeys at dusk or horse drawn carriages gliding through misty tree-lined boulevards? The purple title and lush period setting make the film (based on an Ivan Turgenev story) a near perfect guilty pleasure, and it should be approached as such.

dmangibson-1 Turgenev's novel is ripe for cinematic treatment but Jerzy makes one wrong decision after another and sucks the life and drama out of the novel. Though Timothy Hutton is a serviceable lead -- his Russian dance though completely out of character and not in the book is a standout -- Valeria Golino is horribly miscast as is Kinski. The script also takes such liberties with the structure and characterizations that the movie ends up collapsing under its own weight. As the filmmaker never truly establishes Hutton's commitment and love for Gemma we don't care what happens between he and Kinski. Throughout the movie the director takes what were written as character scenes and opens them up into elaborate set pieces -- the fair, the opera, the masked ball -- underscoring his insecurity about our attachment to his characters and their wants and desires. He also has the most annoying directorial tic of starting almost every scene by dollying the camera behind some foreground element; flowers, tree branches, curtains and then finding our characters making their entrance. Miramax should have repo-ed the dolly and track and given him a tripod to stick the camera on.Turgenev deserves better. Read the book; it's much more cinematic on the page then in this film.One last question: what is William Forsythe doing in this movie?

Carl S Lau Warning: spoilers follow"Torrents of Spring" is an HBO European, horse and carriage, costume drama from the late 1980's. Bought off of e-Bay for less than $7, it is an ex-rental VHS tape that immediately says something about the movie: the initial scenes show tape wear, indicating that the movie was watched for a few minutes and then quickly taken out of the VHS recorder/player and dumped back into its box. The entire movie is told in flashback in which the heart of the movie depicts a young nobleman, Timothy Hutton, in conflict over two women: Valeria Golino, in the role of a bakery shop owner's pretty daughter, and Nastassja Kinski, as a rich married woman who can buy anything."Torrents of Spring" has a running time of 102 minutes and neatly breaks into two parts. It would be charitable to characterize the first part of the movie as awful because descriptive phrases come to mind: stiff as a board, stuffed shirt, trite dialogue, awful framing, amateur hour, cardboard characters. Hutton has the look of Pierce Brosnan, trying to do the right thing. Very early on, he falls in love with Valeria Golino's character and after a series of events proposes marriage that he will finance by selling his estate and giving his serfs their freedom - thus drastically cutting the proceeds of the sale. Somewhere around the twenty minute mark, Nastassja Kinski appears in a dreadful looking wig. She takes a fancy to Hutton and through a telescope watches his courting of the pretty shop owner's daughter in a tethered balloon. It is difficult to suppress the thought that Nastassja has just escaped from a villainous role from "The Three Musketeers." Empty chatter and strained moments fill the first sixty minutes of the film, leading one to wonder how much worse "Torrents of Spring" can get. Some way or other, Nastassja finds out about Hutton's marriage and the necessity to sell his estate. But she is after him and sets a trap for him by offering to buy it. At this point, "Torrents of Spring" has risen to the top of the heap as potentially Nastassja's worst movie, ever.There is a very clear break in continuity in which "Torrents of Spring" shifts from its lackluster veneer into a completely different phase that holds out the potential of vitality. Without her wig, Nastassja loses her hat while chasing Hutton on horseback through a forest. This is a transforming moment that leads into Nastassja's seduction of Hutton. From that moment in the forest, one sees and experiences what Nastassja can do on screen. She takes control of it and never lets it go. It would be very unfair to reveal how the movie ends. It is too bad that the same vision and energy was not invested in the first sixty minutes of the movie. "Torrents of Spring" has its problems or perhaps Nastassja can't act while wearing a wig?This film looks a lot better on the DVD transfer because it is in widescreen format and gives a much needed added dimension compared to the restrictive full screen version on VHS tape.

Lanwench This is an extremely amateurish, ham-handed film, with lousy accents, stilted dialogue, and a waste of the unconvincing Timothy Hutton as a disillusioned Russian nobleman (!!!)Valeria Golino is beautiful, but her character awfully two dimensional - and nobody could possibly believe Nastassja Kinski's hardboiled seductress. The entire film has that cheesy pan-European soft-focus quality found usually on late-night premium cable channels, but with a little less gratuitous nudity.However, there is a lovely scene wherein Nastassja and Timothy go to visit a Gypsy camp and dance around with ever-increasing attraction to one another. The music is fabulous, and there isn't much of the aforementioned crappy dialogue. If I could find just that scene on DVD, I'd buy it. Otherwise, give this one a pass.