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| Adventure springs to mind from this neat, painted character-poster for Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose |
The Name of the Rose is an adaptation of Italian writer-philosopher-semiotician Umberto Eco's (The Prague Cemetery (2011)) first novel and the fourth movie from French director Jean-Jacques Annaud (The Bear (1988)).
Annaud had developed and nursed the project for 4 years and taken his time with studies of the novel, the medieval portrayal and facts presented. And with the casting of all the monks in the film that all have very distinct and interesting faces.
Rose is a whodunit crime thriller set in the very unusual place of a 13th century monastery in Northern Italy. Here, a monk has thrown himself off the roof of the monastery in a hailstorm, and soon other eerie irregularities follow. William of Baskerville is a learned monk from another, more liberal order, who is called upon to solve the mystery. And he does so with the aid of his young apprentice, Adso.
Sean Connery (Time Bandits (1981)) is a major reason to watch Rose, although his casting wasn't obvious at the time of production, when his career was in a slump. But seeing him tackle the Sherlock Holmes-inspired character (Holmes is also referenced in a few lines in the film) is a joy. He has the warmth and humor that takes some of the gruesomeness out of the film, and the possibility of anything supernatural at hand never seems a possibility due to his straight-shooting nature.
As Adso, we get a 17 year-old Christian Slater (True Romance (1993)), who breaks his celibacy with a poverty-stricken girl in a feisty sex scene. Annaud's keen sense of the sensual is very clear throughout Rose, a film with lots of intellectual and religious ideas floating around, which is aptly balanced with the horrors of the monastery and the vileness of its inhabitants, as Annaud tackles the occult to great effect and seems to revel in the stuff. Most vile of them all is Ron Perlman (Drive (2011)), whose already somewhat ghoulish features have been heightened greatly to suit his menacing, humpbacked character here:
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| Ron Perlman in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose |
The details:
F. Murray Abraham (The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)) plays the adversary, who arrives late in the film after it has lost some pace.
Still, it is a very enjoyable time and a very specific, different, exotic place to be taken to for a couple of hours.
The film seems to have an implicit, agnosticist skepticism of all the (Christian) religion involved, which is represented mainly as ludicrous or of very poor consequences, but Baskerville also shows another, lighter alternative, retaining his Christian faith. And the ending is definitely no rejection of strong faith and quite memorable.
Annaud is working on his Chinese adventure movie Wolf Totem (2015) at present.
Related review:
Jean-Jacques Annaud: The Bear/L'Ours (1988) - Amazing bear story for (almost) the entire family
Watch the original trailer here
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| Sean Connery and Christian Slater in Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Name of the Rose |
Budget: 18.5 mil. $
Box office: 77.1 mil. $
= Big hit, - mainly in Europe, (Rose only made 7.2 mil. $ in the U.S.)
What do you think of The Name of the Rose?
Other unusually located whodunits that you want to recommend?
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