Janos Gereben kindly crtiques for us ...

>..."Bride of the Wind [which seeks to show] that Mahler (Jonathan Pryce)
>was a great composer and Gropius (Simon Verhoeven) "changed the face of
>Vienna"...World War I ...  a matter of a passing remark between two women
>about lacking men and a good variety of pastry, then the clumsily shot
>battlefield death of Kokoschka (Vincent Perez)....

I haven't seen the flick (it's not yet showing here) but it sounds like
a piece of dud faction.  To be sure, it's true that Mahler was a great
composer, but Gropius changed hardly a brow of Vienna--that was done by
a handful of architects beginning about 1850 when the Ringstrasse began to
be built, and notably including one who committed suicide when the emperor
offhandedly remarked he didn't like the man's design of the new opera
house.  As for Kokoschka's death on the battlefield, it's true he was
seriously wounded during World War I, but he recovered sufficiently for
him to paint his way to fame subsequent to it.  Indeed, World War I was
by no means incidental to any aspect of life in postwar Vienna.  Rather,
it was seminal.  People remembered not the scarcity of of a favored kind
of pastry, but rather the weeks of starvation which they suffered toward
the end of the conflict.  And it was the war that reduced Vienna from its
longtime role as the capital of a great empire, to an impoverished and
shrunken city in a trucated state one-quarter the size that it had been
before.  Practically the only heritage left to Vienna was the intellectual
cache left over from bygone days, which would explain Mahler, along with
the modernist artists who continued to build on the tradition of the
Sezession and writers like Musil, Kraus and von Doderer who wrote so well
and arrestingly about what the war had wrought and what then ensued.

I fear that Vienna has become another place that's been Pearl-Harbored by
flicks.

Denis Fodor