Planet Ibsen ENTERTAINMENT TODAY Review

5 Films

When I attended the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in February, certain types of films caught my eye. I found myself in the audience for Mozart and the Whale, The West Wittering Affair, Shadowboxer, Planet Ibsen, and Believe in Me. Of course, I didn’t really just wander into those screenings – I put them on my schedule of festival happenings and made sure to see them. And you know what? I’m glad I did. All of these films explore, at some level, assumptions about gender in Western society.

Next is Planet Ibsen. This is a surreal take on gender issues quite specifically, based on Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 play, A Doll’s House, which is considered to be the first stage production with a feminist slant on marriage. Director Jonathan Wyche creates a world of the mind to ponder marital power struggles, women’s awakening consciousness, and men’s dawning realizations. The images and the plot are all fantastical and vaguely historical, supposedly originating in the head of one of Ibsen’s real-life contemporaries, writer August Strindberg. But the issues and messages are absolutely contemporary and very real in their import. This is not classical realist cinema in any sense of the word. So it’s avant-garde not only in terms of the look and feel of the film, but in its positioning of gender dynamics as still requiring thoughtful analysis and remedial work to bring about true equality. Variety

Excerpt from Entertainment Today. See the Mach 3rd Edition for reviews on Mozart and the Whale, The West Wittering Affair, Shadowboxer, & Believe in Me.

Entertainment Today (March 3, 2006), by Madelyn Ritrosky