"It was just like Romeo and Juliet, only it ended in tragedy"

reviewed Sun, 24 Sep 2000

You're not going to see many movies with dialogue in English, Welsh, and Yiddish, so that alone may be a reason to see Solomon and Gaenor, a moody, tragic romance that was up for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. It stars Ioan Gruffudd, who may be familiar to some of you from the "Horatio Hornblower" series on A&E, as a Jewish salesman in early twentieth-century Wales who falls in love with a coal miner's daughter, played by Nia Roberts. Times being what they are, Solomon doesn't reveal his true identity to the devoutly chapel-going Gaenor, which of course causes all kinds of problems, especially when she gets pregnant.

The movie starts out beautifully -- Gruffudd and Roberts are wonderful actors, charismatic and gorgeous without seeming too pretty for a grimy Welsh village, and it's charming to watch them fall for each other. And there's a certain romantic appeal to a man or woman who will defy his or her entire culture, religion, and family to be with you (me, I can't even get a guy to cross the Potomac). But as it moves from sweet love story to doomed romance, the pace slows to a crawl and the acting become overheated. It turns melodramatic in a Harlequin-romance kind of way, with histrionic confrontation scenes and absurdly mawkish situations.

By the end, the movie had lost its novelty and charm for me -- it was just too grim and drawn out. Still, it's a unique setting, if not a unique story, and I got to hear Welsh spoken for the first time (the only Welsh words I know are "Bryn Mawr" and "Bala Cynwyd" and other Main Line suburbs).

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