Me Without You

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Friendship can prove more complicated than romance. Me Without You follows two British girls from their 1970s preadolescence to contemporary adulthood. Holly (Michelle Williams, Dick), a shy Jewish girl with loving but bookish parents, grew up next to Marina (Anna Friel, The Land Girls), whose glamorous but unstable parents render her flamboyant but a mess inside. The girls form an alliance, each envying the other and finding solace in the relationship, but over time, they sabotage as much as support each other, sometimes at the same time. Both have an affair with a randy college professor (Kyle MacLachlan), but it's Holly's attraction to Marina's older brother Nat (Oliver Milburn) that, in the end, forces the women to redefine their lives. Me Without You is excellently performed and full of telling details. Though the heroines are often confused, the movie has a lucid clarity that is compassionate but open-eyed. --Bret Fetzer

Customer Reviews:

Nostalgia For Me.......2007-07-28

I'm not a movie person, I'd rather read, but every so often I look for a chick flick or foreign film that's not totally mainstream. I also want to watch a movie that my husband wouldn't or couldn't get just because he's a guy. I loved this movie. I grew up then, I remember these times and these situations, and while life wasn't perfect I had hopes and dreams and friends that I don't have now. So I say if you want some nostalgic and different chick flick watch this(AND by the way I loved Hysterical Blindness as well!), but don't bring a guy.

BFF.......2007-02-18

This movie captures the essence of Best Friends Forever. Your best friend is the one person you connect with and share secrets with but as you grow older the relationship must change or it becomes confining. The actors do an excellent job of showing how the relationship can be loving or painful but that imperfection is what sets this movie apart from the hollywood fluff stories. I love the 80's setting.

It follows you home.......2006-02-03

At the end of the first time seeing this I didn't like it. Then as the days passed, I kept thinking about it and it snuck into my heart. I watched it two more times before returning it to Blockbuster.
This is a story of a not so perfect friendship. Michelle Williams plays the part of Holly, "the sweetest girl in all the world." She is convincing and charming as an intelligent, shy, overlooked beauty. Her best friend's brother, played by Oliver Milburn, is absolutely captivating and charming. If you don't fall in love with this movie, you'll fall in love with him. The music used fits perfectly into every mood and emotion that is explored in the lives of these two girls.
Anna Friel does a capital job as the loud-mouthed, self-obsessed friend. The contrasts between their personalities and the events that unfold are both heartbreaking and heartwarming.

Friends Can Be Too Close........2005-09-19

Marina and Holly were best friends as children and vowed to always be together. But as they grow older, the nature of their relationship changes for the worse. Although Marina (Anna Friel) is an outgoing party girl, she seems unable to find an identity of her own and instead relies on the smarter and more introverted Holly (Michele Williams) to provide her with one. Holly is in love with Marina's brother Nat (Oliver Milburn), but Marina's jealousy has always come between them. Holly can hardly have a relationship with any man before Marina claims him for herself, leaving Holly heartbroken. After college, Holly pursues a writing career and Marina seems to make a career of forcing herself into Holly's relationships. For some reason, although she blames Marina for her misery, Holly allows Marina to turn her life upside down.

"Me Without You" is an especially true-to-life character drama. Marina and Holly are both interesting people, and each is sympathetic in her own way. The film's characters, their actions, and their feelings are all believable. Anna Friel and Michele Williams are exceptionally effective in their roles. It turns out that Michele Williams, probably best known for her teen roles in "Dick" and in television's "Dawson's Creek", is a very fine actress. Kyle MacLachlan has a small role as Daniel, one of Holly's and Marina's love interests. A story about a childhood bond that gets out of hand and becomes a co-dependent relationship of disastrous proportions sounds like it might be either a colossal bore or a horror flick. "Me Without You" is neither. Sandra Goldbacher's adept direction moves the story along at a fair clip, and it is easy to share these characters' frustrations.

Friendships are necessary, but sometimes they are not a good thing.......2005-09-02

Friendship is an important thing in living and there are plenty of films that tell the stories of great friendships. "Me Without You" would not be one of those films, because you repeatedly have to wonder when you are watching this 2001 film whether Holly (Michelle Williams) and Marina (Anna Friel) really like each other. The two girls grew up living next door to each other in London in the early 1970s, and when they were young, dressing up and bouncing on their beds, they make a pact of eternal friendship. It seems clear this is a mistake, because Holly is the smart one but follows the lead of the dominating Marina, but there is nothing the two can do about it because their lives are so completely intertwined that a trauma for one invariable involves the other as they grow up and move on into the 1980s.

"Me Without You" is directed by Sandra Goldbacher from a script by Goldbacher and Laurence Coriat, and I wonder what personal demons they are exorcising here because the pain and regret rings so true. I also find myself considering this film to be the anti-"Beaches." There you had two young girls who form a friendship because of a chance meeting and who keep in touch over the years, especially during the key moments in their life. Her you have two young girls who form a friendship because they live next door and they have nobody else in their lives. They live together as often as not and are in each other's lives almost constantly, so that every time they fall in love the other seems to be some sort of impediment to living happily ever after. We jump from year to year, with attention paid to what Holly and Marina wear along with the music they listen to, and the question is whether the two will be able to survive their friendship.

You can pick your moment where this friendship clearly becomes dysfunctional and a bad thing rather than a good thing, but I think the die is cast when Holly finally sleeps with Marina's brother Nat (Oliver Miburn). She has had a crush on him since the beginning, but Marina sees this as some sort of betrayal, and from then on Holly is the sympathetic figure in this story, although to some extent she wins that position by default. The division between the two friends becomes starker when they both end up in the bed of Daniel (Kyle MacLachlan), an American lecturing at their college. The both want to sleep with Daniel and he obliges them both, and then is thoroughly befuddled when it turns out the two young women are closer than the thought. For Marina the relationship seems to be nothing more than another competition with Holly, while for Holly the truth takes away all of the joy of an important personal epiphany.

I was not sure why Michelle Williams was adopting a Brit accent to do this film, but she was the reason I checked out this film, not just because I saw a shot of the seaweed scene. To date in terms of "Dawson's Creek" alumni, Williams might be the forgotten one because she does not get big films but she is putting together a solid resume with films like "Prozac Nation" and "If These Walls Can Talk 2." The important thing here is that if Williams's name is enough to get people to see this movie with its almost brutally realistic depiction of friendship between two young women, then so much the better. "Me Without You" is not an uplifting film, but given its honesty it certainly is a refreshing one.

Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You Are Going

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Are you there?
crossing dimensions...of love...
"But, she's the woman of your dreams"
No te mueras sin decirme a donde vas

Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You Are Going
Starring: Mariana Arias , Candela Balbuena , Camila Cabral , Manuel Cruz , and Ricardo Fasan
Manufacturer: Cinemateca
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B0002J5996
Release Date: 2004-09-07

Description

CINEMA PARADISO meets WINGS OF DESIRE in this fantastical and hopelessly romantic film. Dario Grandinetti (TALK TO HER) stars in this startling, mind-bending romantic drama from Argentina's master of magical realism, director Eliseo Subiela (DARK SIDE OF THE HEART, MAN FACING SOUTHEAST). Grandinetti stars as Leopoldo, a lonely film projectionist who has invented a machine to record his dreams. Through a series of odd events, Leopoldo discovers that he is the reincarnation of one of the inventors of cinema, and that a woman he sees in his dreams is his eternal companion on a trip through the centuries.

Customer Reviews:

Are you there?.......2007-05-03

What if you had a great, timeless love, who found you again in every lifetime? What if dreams were like radio transmissions to the soul, awakening what our brains can't remember?

Those are the messages of "Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You Are Going," an exquisite mixture of magical realism and a deep love story. Eliseo Subiela did a brilliant job spinning up a movie full of lingering, haunting imagery, as well as an ode to the cinema, dreams -- and how love can bring meaning to anyone's life.

Leopoldo (Darío Grandinetti) has a dull job at a failing theatre, a fretful wife, and a pet plant called Anita. But at night he works on his "dream collector," and on the night he first gets it to work, he captures a dream of a beautiful woman playing the piano, stirring feelings of passionate love. And the woman magically appears in the theatre the next day -- a spirit named Rachel (Mariana Arias) who says that he was her husband in a past life.

Bewitched by Rachel, and the tales of the life they once lived together, Leopoldo spends most of his time listening to her, and exploring the mysterious abilities of the dream collector -- it's allowing him to see the spirits of the dead, who haven't been reborn. And through Rachel, he explores the limits of life, rebirth, and a love that can't be broken even by death.

Everybody gets bogged down at some point, in a life that seems dreary and mundane. Some people never escape it. But Eliseo Subiela shows us one man's journey beyond that drab existance -- real, timeless, selfless love can drag us up and give us meaning that nothing ever had before.

Most movies can't pack as much into their story as "Don't Die..." manages to -- it touches on God, reincarnation, true love, the origins of cinema, and a robot that prays and sings. Despite being so full, the story seems exquisitely simple. Subiela fills the screen with lots of pale light, sepia-toned flashbacks and quiet conversations.

And he brings us beautifully understated moments like Rachel wandering through a hospital nursery, wistfully asking a newborn Leopoldo, "Are you there?" But the highlight is when we see what reincarnation looks like: hundreds of spirits, of all ages and cultures, walking eagerly towards the light of rebirth. Even if you don't believe in reincarnation, it's a lovely sight.

Grandinetti does an understatedly brilliant job as a humble projectionist who eagerly follows his dreams, and is trying to sort out what Rachel tells him. He grows more expressive and sweet throughout the movie, and you find yourself yearning to see him find some happiness. And Arias is a perfect mixture of wisdom, playfulness, and sorrow, and she can convey more in a twist of her neck than most actresses can with their whole bodies.

"Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You're Going" is a bittersweet gem, a beautiful ode to love, death and the art of moviemaking. A must-see, for anyone who's longed to find that distant "someone."

crossing dimensions...of love..........2005-11-01

Eliseo Subiela, the director of this film, is the great South American cinematic fabulist, having also made Man Facing Southeast (still waiting for that to appear on DVD) and The Dark Side of the Heart. Here, he creates characters who "span time" (to use the great expression from Buffalo '66), similar to the theme of the Christopher Reeve film Somewhere in Time.

But in Don't Die Without Telling Me Where You Are Going, Subiela transcends the American film considerably and that's because the main character here, Leopoldo, is directly involved in CREATING the woman of his dreams rather than, as is the case with the Christopher Reeve character in Somewhere in Time, being the passive recipient of fate that brings him when chance permits to his eternal love.

In addition, Subiela wisely and directly connects this active bridging of dimensions with cinema itself. Leopoldo is a film projectionist in a second-rate movie theater in, one presumes, Buenos Aires, that shows old and new films both. His dreams pervade the film--another difference between this and the American film--commencing with a vision of a young man working long ago with Thomas Edison who creates a device to project images--the kinetiscope, which was really the first movie projector.

When the love of his life appears in one of his dreams--Leopoldo has analogously created a device to record and view his dreams--she reveals herself as the wife of the young man, who is (or was) Leopoldo himself, now the reincarnated version of the young man.

This beautiful magic realist film penetrates right to the core of romanticism and brings to the viewer the essence of love cinematically. Love, says Subiela, is the dream we cannot live without, the dream we create in our real day to day lives to transcend what we know every day and live beyond that everyday life. Love, he says in this film, is both the real and the fantastic--both are represented here, as Leopoldo's wife of 20 years and his eternal love who speaks to him as a spirit of his long past.

His wife is a dyed in the wool realist who, because she loves her husband, tolerates his eccentric ways (he carries a plant with him wherever he goes--an entity that, we come to realize, he needs to prove to himself that his feelings generate vibrations which the plant responds to; his wacky dream machine he connects to a fedora). The whimsy of the dream machine in the fedora is a great touch and subtly recalls life from decades past when things were simpler and quieter and, we feel from Leopoldo's character, more heartfelt.

Leopoldo's friend, Oscar, is another inventor and this is another excellent story device; the two men can bounce ideas off each other, again giving this film much more substance in the realm of bridging the real and the fantastic than Somewhere in Time. Oscar has invented a robot and is initially skeptical of the results of Leopoldo's invention. But once he sees Raquel, Leopoldo's eternal love, he begins to change his mind...

This is a great film, full of beauty and mysticism, echoing the depths of the heart. Highly recommended.

"But, she's the woman of your dreams".......2005-02-20

It is uplifting to see so many Argentinean movies from the 90s come out on DVD in the US, since this provides a good alternative to those people interested in watching something different from the usual Hollywood productions. "Don't die without telling me where you are going" is one of the most renowned Latin American movies of its decade and one in which Dario Grandinetti shows what he is capable of in terms of his acting skills.

The film starts with images from a long time ago, in which a man named William is trying to invent a machine to allow people to see each other's dreams. William's boss was Thomas Edison and the dream machine became what we currently know as the camera. Shortly after that we are transported to the Argentina of the present where we meet Leopoldo (Dario Grandinetti), who works in a run-down movie theatre where he is in charge of the projection booth. The owners are planning to sell the theater before they have to face bankruptcy, and as a result Leopoldo will likely lose his job. But he is not too worried, since his real interest is in a project in which he works on his free time: a collector of dreams. The idea is to capture the individual's brain waves and transform them into images, which can then be recorded and watched the next morning.

Leopoldo is married, has the habit of walking everywhere with Anita, his plant, and dreams of his success in his special project. And one day he does it! He records his dreams and realizes that he is in love with a woman that he has never seen before. Shortly after that, Rachel (Mariana Arias) appears in the theater as a spirit, calling him William. She explains that they used to be married and live in New Jersey in their previous life, but while he reincarnated as Leopoldo, she decided not to reincarnate after her death.

The original idea used in the film is enough to make it special, but once you add the expert depiction of the human emotions and the message of hope it delivers, the result is a movie that is clearly among the best of its era. Even Mariana Arias grants a good performance in her first appearance on the big screen. She was one of the most famous Argentinean models of the past decade, and as most of you probably know, when a model starts to act, the results are usually not very encouraging. But in this case, the outcome is not bad at all. The movie also provided me with the chance of seeing for a few minutes the actor that in my opinion is the leader of its generation, Leonardo Sbaraglia, and even in that brief amount of time he shows what he is made of.

I encourage all those people that have not been exposed to Latin American movies, to give this film a chance. I am sure that you will come back for more! - 4.5 stars

No te mueras sin decirme a donde vas.......2005-01-18

It is one of the best films of Eliseo Subiela. He knows how to direct a movie, a beautifull, romantic, extraodinary film. A beautifull pieace of art. Eliseo shows you how love has no time and no place, even what we know as death it is not powerfull enoughto stop a love of centuries... if you like surrealism movies these is a must.

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Nostalgia For Me
BFF
It follows you home
Friends Can Be Too Close.
Friendships are necessary, but sometimes they are not a good thing

Me Without You [Region 2]
Starring: Ella Jones , Anna Popplewell , Cameron Powrie , Trudie Styler , and Allan Corduner
Director: Sandra Goldbacher
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B00006JY2E

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Customer Reviews:

Nostalgia For Me.......2007-07-28

BFF.......2007-02-18

It follows you home.......2006-02-03

Friends Can Be Too Close........2005-09-19

Friendships are necessary, but sometimes they are not a good thing.......2005-09-02

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