Bride of the Wind Reviews

A lavish, old-fashioned biopic about Alma Schindler (Sarah Wynter), the muse of composer Gustav Mahler (Jonathan Pryce), painter Oskar Kokoschka (Vincent Perez), Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius (Simon Verhoeven) and writer Franz Werfel (Gregor Seberg), as well as the friend (and sometimes more) of a dazzling cross-section of Viennese artists, including painter Gustav Klimt (August Schmölzer). Directed by Bruce Beresford from a script by Marilyn Levy, this handsome film deals with some 20 years of Alma's life, beginning in 1901, when she met Mahler, and ending in the early years of her third and last marriage, to Werfel. Born in 1879, the daughter of a landscape painter and a one-time actress, Alma was raised in a cultured household and at a young age became an accomplished pianist with ambitions to compose. Equally famous for her beauty and her outspokenness, Alma married Mahler when she was 22 and he was 20 years older, a world-renowned musician with a congenital heart condition. After his death, she took up with pioneering Expressionist Kokoschka (the film's title comes from a 1913 painting he did of them together). When he was presumed killed in WWI, she married Gropius, then divorced him and moved on to Werfel, later the author of The Song of Bernadette. She bore four children, three of whom died before adulthood (including Manon Gropius, whose death as a teenager inspired Alban Berg's mournful 1935 "Violin Concerto"); her surviving daughter, Anna, became a noted sculptor. Alma, who died in New York in 1964, lived through turbulent times and knew fascinating people. But Beresford's movie is from the waxworks school of period filmmaking, scrupulously attentive to details of clothing, furniture and accessories, but lacking in dramatic vigor. Far too much dialogue is of the, "So, Herr Gropius, you are an architect?" variety, and while Alma was by all accounts both bewitchingly beautiful and captivatingly intelligent, Wynter plays her as a petulant, self-centered girl (even when she's supposed to be in her 40s) who spends as much time modeling fancy clothes and taking rest cures as she does cultivating her celebrated mind. That the movie fails to make Alma a vivid presence makes such admittedly bizarre real-life events — like the jilted Kokoschka's commissioning of a life-sized doll in her likeness — seem simply ridiculous, rather than evidence of her compelling relationships with creative and passionate men. She deserves better, and so do viewers.