Bride of the Wind (2001)

Is a dreary and inept soap opera any more tolerable when it pretends to peer into the private biographies of famous artistic figures? In Bride of the Wind, a sodden ''feminist'' vulgarization of the life of Alma Schindler, we follow Alma (Sarah Wynter), a young and pretty nobody, as she seduces and weds the middle aged Gustav Mahler (Jonathyn Pryce), who is already a controversial conductor composer staking his claim to greatness in turn of the century Vienna.

The film skitters through their marriage like a flip book with every third page missing, and then, with even less coherence, it sketches in Alma's dalliances with a handful of follow-up mentors, notably the mad hatter expressionist Oskar Kokoschka (Vincent Perez). The claim is made throughout for Alma as her own woman -- she's a composer, too, damn it! -- yet the character we see is defined almost entirely in relation to her stick figure artist lovers. Wynter, her lips parted, suggests Cate Blanchett locked in a freeze frame of Imploring Sensitivity, and the miscast Pryce plays Mahler as squishy and self pitying, without a hint of the composer's soulful rectitude.

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