Amos Lassen wrote on 06/02/2010:

"The City of Your Final Destination"

Malcontents and Adulterers

Amos Lassen

Omar (Omar Metwally) is a professor of literature at an University of Colorado and he tries to get legal permission to write the biography of a writer who has only had one novel published. The author's family is against the idea so Omar decides to go to South America to meet them and get their permission. He finds a dysfunctional family with many secrets and skeletons in the closet. Deirdre (Alexandra Maria Lara) arrives to see how things are going and it gets very interesting. The writer's widow, (Laura Linney) and the writer's girlfriend, Ardenia, (Charlotte Gainsbourg), the gay brother of the writer (Anthony Hopkins) and his lover (Hiroyuki Sanada) all live together on an estate far from anything else and we get a study of personalities and a look at the dynamics between there people. We also see Omar's feelings for Ardenia and the choices he is forced to make. The film is about decesions and how they influence the lives of everyone.
Based on the novel by Peter Cameron, the screenplay was written by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and the film was directed by James Ivory. This is a good example of literary cinema.The characters all play cultured, cosmopolitan residents of a remote place in Uruguay and they seem to be constantly philosophizing and bickering. People talk a lot and we are plunged into the emotions of the characters. We realize that what we are watching is little more than a power struggle between adulterers and malcontents as they test the bonds of family as well as the boundaries that confine them.