Bille August's treatment of the Isabel Allende novel (with most of the "magical realism" weeded out) might almost be a treatment of a Danielle Steel or Sidney Sheldon novel: a glob of sentimental (i.e., universally accessible) Leftism about love across the class divide, the belated enlightenment of a stick-in-the-mud, hope for a brighter tomorrow. It evinces little feeling for place (a mythical South American country modelled on Chile but actually re-created in Portugal and Denmark) or for period (the middle two-fourths of the 20th Century); there's an unrehearsed cacophony of accents; different characters age at startlingly different rates; and the viewer is transported to no world beyond the dollars-and-cents one of the International Co-Production with an All-Star Cast: Jeremy Irons (a wad of chewing gum, or something, wedged behind his upper lip), Meryl Streep, Glenn Close (black clothes, black hair, black eyes, looking possibly like a native of the planet Uranus), Winona Ryder, Antonio Banderas, Maria Conchita Alonso (kneeling in front of Jeremy Irons and unbuttoning his trousers in each of her first two scenes: she only has one other), Vanessa Redgrave, Armin Mueller-Stahl (dubbed by another). (1994) — Duncan Shepherd