Déjà Vu (1998)

I love this movie so much

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Blistering performances.

I once experienced the most vivid sense of Deju Vu. It was having met a young woman in Copenhagen, my first trip to Europe in 1968, as a single man of 28. We were not in love, but we connected. We were going "steady" for a few days...and I was staying at her apartment, where she was living with a family.She was a long term visitor from Poland, and in some ways we didn't even connect, but there was the strongest sense of being on a treadmill, where my destiny was pre-ordained. Although I was in a strange city, I felt amazingly comfortable.I'm not a mystic, so I attribute it to a combination of jet lag, or the sun rising in the middle of the May night, of a combination of irreality, and absolute physical-sexual comfort. It never happened before...or again.Now about the film. In spite of my relating to the Deja Vu aspect, I found the conversation lacking in spontaneity or in believability. I always gauge the quality of a film by the minor characters, are they more than placeholders to complete a plot. The wife and fiancé of the two central characters were just that, each so devoid of realism that the kind of sympathy for someone who is perfunctorily discarded is avoided.And then there's the song, " They'll be blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover...." the beautiful tune that evokes a moment in history, a time when the lives of vital young men were as fragile as a kitten loose in Trafalgar Square. It was a time when a glance between two people, a connection, could mean that if taken, if grasped, they might have a moment of joy, of completion, that very likely could be the only such taste of life of the man facing probable death."......tomorrow when the world is free," was understood to be a tomorrow that one of them would never see, that could only be lived in the memory of one whom he loved, if the love was taken at that moment, never to be offered again.I don't know whether those born after those years can understand what the song meant. And perhaps for those who loved the film, the connection was made, and for those I'm glad the film gave them a slight whiff of those now forgotten days.

What a truly ghastly film. How did they get the starring cast (Anna Massey, Vanessa Redgrave, Stephen Dillane) to take part in this indulgence by the Jaglom family? A silly story about destiny, fate, etc, destroying people's lives, pretending to be one about the destiny of love. It made me cross that I wasted my time watching it. Don't waste yours, unless you feel like watching a mindless sloppy romance on a par with daytime TV soap operas, in which case take out the Kleenex and candy and have a gooey afternoon.

Oh my God that was bad. A la Woody Allen, the actors seemed to be striving to get by with just a wisp of an idea and their own identification with their character. They failed. Miserably. The conversations were wooden and facial expressions usually consisted of self-conscious smiles (grimaces?). When a person is struggling to put their deepest doubts or uncertainties into words, one doesn't have a smile upon one's face. I'm just grateful that I didn't pay good money to see this in a theater or that a friend had recommended it. I would have been out the money and would have been terribly disappointed in my friend.

This is a love story with more truth than is comfortable sometimes. I think most of us have either loved two people at once or had to decide whether we should stay or leave a relationship. That struggle is what this movie is about. Stay with what is comfortable or follow your heart.This movie is a bit uneven, sometimes pulling you in so deeply that you can hardly breathe, then in the very next scene you will feel like you are watching a documentary. You feel you know how it will end one moment, and the next you are uncertain. The film takes you back and forth on so many levels. I think that's the point of the movie's structure really -- the watcher is pulled one way and then the other, just like the people in the movie.We all have to make choices, do you want to follow your heart, no matter where it takes you and accept the uncertainty that goes with it, or do you stay with the comfortable stability of the known?A powerful movie. If you have a chance to see it, go for it. I would recommend seeing it alone to get the full impact. Commercials and chatter would ruin the mood.