To Begin Again

A slow miniature about an expatriate author who, after collecting a Nobel Prize, returns to his home town and rekindles an old romance, this is nothing if not international in its theme of 'one only gets old when one doesn't love' (the film won an Oscar for Best Foreign Language film). Some deft performances do not really compensate for a painless academicism in the direction, and a truly numbing over-use of that baroque pop, Pachelbel's 'Canon', on the soundtrack. And the revelation that the author is suffering from a terminal disease only adds to the sentimental obviousness of the message.