Product Description

Studio: Sony Pictures Home Ent Release Date: 04/22/2008 Run time: 109 minutes Rating: R

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #53536 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 2003-05-20
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Color, Dubbed, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Dubbed in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds
• Running time: 109 minutes

Amazon.com
This Spanish fluff from 1992 won an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, but its significance goes about as far as you can throw a flower petal. The story finds an elderly artist (Fernando Fernán Gómez) giving shelter to a deserter (Jorge Sanz) from the royalist army in provincial Spain, 1931. While on the premises, the young man naturally notes the beauty of all four of his host's daughters. Each takes her turn at seducing him, but this isn't late-night cable TV so much as it is a series of brief character sketches filled out by the way each woman takes charge. It's a clever idea made more clever by the fact that these sundry beauties are acting on the libertine impulses to which their free-thinking father subscribes in principle but has sheepishly abandoned for love. But the film, directed by Fernando Trueba, is rendered so lightly it could almost be mistaken for calendar art. --Tom Keogh

Customer Reviews

Funny and sexy, but also has substance
I disagree with the Amazon editorial. Yes, this is a funny, sexy movie; maybe a young man's dream come true. It also has a lot of real commentary on Spanish society at the time; right before the Spanish Civil War. The characters end the movie thinking all is well in the world and don't know the Civil War is right around the corner. I am sure this aspect is lost on most American audiences, but it is a very real part of the film and juxtaposes the light, sexy, comic aspects of this movie. The scene where the priest hangs himself in the church right before the young couple get married is very symbolic of how the church felt at this time of liberalization and the backlash that led to the Civil War (1930s). See the movie! It is one of my all-time favorites.

Belle Epoque, Beau Film
Belle Epoque is a beautifully rendered film with a good sense of humor and a well-paced plot. Unlike what a previous reviewer wrote, it is actually set in the years PRECEDING the Spanish Civil War, that is, when a republic was established after the abdication of Alfonso XIII in 1931. The debate between Monarchism and Carlism versus Republicanism and Anarchism -a split in Spanish society that would culminate in the outbreak of the Civil War in 1936- is made accessible as expressed by the colorful characters in this movie: the pampered mollycoddle Juanito, the irreverent priest, the artist-patriarch (who nevertheless lives like a "scared old bourgeois"). The Civil War of the 1936-39 was only the last of the many civil wars that erupted in Spain during the modern era (e.g. the Carlist Wars of the Nineteenth Century). The movie will throw light on this turbulent time as it affected ordinary people, and for those of you not squeamish about the idea of a man sleeping with four beautiful women in the course of a few days, I recommend this movie highly. "Belle Epoque" is NOT fluff or late-night soft porn; it is only disguising its gravity behind a façade of lightheartedness.

Wonderful Spanish film
The story line for this film is not anything extraordinary but the actors/actresses weave a wonder web of mayhem and love that pervades through the simple story line to make this a timeless classic. It is also interesting how Trueba uses role reversal to turn the tables on poor Fernando and throws him into a matriarchal setting where the men AREN'T the ones wearing the pants in the family....quite literally in one sense. Overall a great movie that I have seen time and again...Great Castillan spanish accents as well!