Watch Johanna For Free

Sadly Over-hyped

Just perfect...

Fantastic!

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Mundruczo has strong theatrical roots and Johanna, like most of his works, is closer to theater, than film - in fact, to classical opera. The libretto has been written by Janos Terey, a Hungarian poet and writer and it just further clarifies the fact that Johanna is an opera adopted to the big screen.It may or may not work very well, but to treat it as a conventional movie may not be the best approach - the whole set is indeed very surreal: Johanna, a young morphine addict ends up in a dark and moody hospital, where a young doctor falls in love with her and convinces the rest of the doctors to give her a chance and let her work at the hospital as a nurse. The woman starts to treat the terminally ill men in an unusual manner which is not received well by the doctors ending the whole situation in the sacrifice of Johanna (with a chorus reciting the moral of the story).The set is a real hospital, called the "Hospital in the Rock" and was built under the Buda castle in the thirties - it is terrifying and marvelous in the same time and can work very well as an opera set (also note that Terey and Mundruczo already used it for theatrical plays before). Johanna as a character is a profane saint: what she does is obscene, but does work - curing with sexuality, like in Breaking the Waves (Trier). The camera work and the degradation of the film material is also similar to Trier's (think of Medeia for example), and has similar conclusions: both saints are discarded while their powers defeat rationality.In an age of technology the deeply maternal and spiritual rituals are banished from our life, the fall of Johanna is inevitable from the very moment she decides to stay among the terminally ill. The paternalistic hospital, with all the male patients (who will not save the girl in the end) and the male doctors aided by their superiority and academic knowledge destroy the unknown female power: they kill her, discard her and burn her, banishing her from this world. Unlike with Trier, no church bells this time, but the similarity is still very clear.

I'm so glad to know that I've already seen the worst movie of my life.. This was a ridiculous movie, both story and acting were so bad, that I could only leave the theater with a smile on my face, knowing no movie would ever beat this one! You should know I watch art-house-movies on a regular basis, but this one went way too far in trying to renew the fine art of movie-making.I must say I'm not a great fan of opera, so that may have been quite good. For those who do like opera, maybe you should rent this movie, but make sure you turn of your TV-screen and that you don't understand a word of the Hungarian language.. Seriously, those things will ruin your experience.

People walked out of the theatre..fair enough. It's an Art film and an extremely audacious one to boot. But in my humble opinion, it's not worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater.If you can get past the fact that 1) it's an opera, 2) it's sung (very beautifully) in Hungarian, and 3)there's naked old men singing about liver failure..you might actually enjoy this film. If not then perhaps you might find that you can appreciate it as a one off. Whether that is a good or a bad thing, I suppose is up to the viewer.The lead actress Orsi Toth is absolutely stunning in this film. Her performance was uncomfortable, emotive, and surprising. I look forward to seeing her in future films.

Sat through about what seemed like 20 minutes of this attempt at art, though it may have been in fact only 8-12 minutes.I don't know what sort of cameras they shot this with, but as presented at the 2005 Saint Louis Internation Film Festival, the picture had such visible digital compression artifacts that I wished it had been shot with antique analog video camera instead of whatever they used. Then at least the blown-out whites would have had some interesting flange and flare.Sound, similarly, was digitally compromised, or at least had unintended sounds bumping in. The singers were competent, but the music itself was over-composed.I'm not writing a review. More of a warning: You're going to have to love the concept, I think, to sit through this production.I suggest to the authors that they load up a web-server with it, treat it as a storyboard for a real production, and see if anyone bites on it.It's just not ready for putting people in the seats to experience it, and this is from one who loved J. Caouette's "Tarnation".