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Prett y Woman a movie directed by Garry Marshall 1990
Reviews

From: mushk
Category: Films
Date: 05 January 2005

Review

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0100405/

This is one of the greatest films of the last 20 years. A prostitute and her rich client fall in love. The many layers of offensive unreality of this plot are hard to excavate, but the overall meta-message seems to be that money can buy you love and the hollywood dream. Perhaps it can.

What is so good about it? It's moving. Julia Roberts enormous incandescent smile is beautiful enough to make you believe. Gere is a more than adequate foil. In our capitalist times, the idea of living in a hotel and shopping with unlimited credit touches the human spirit. The minor roles, such as the hotel manager, and Gere's business partner lawyer (played by Seinfeld's George) are played mightily and in the case of the manager with sympathy and perfect humour. Our uneasiness about the (within what is acknowledged by the final voiceover as a hard to take fairytale) glamourisation of prostitution actually magnifies our joy at the happy ending. With relief we realise that Julia will chuck in the game and go back to school whether or not Prince Charming arrives in his black chauffeur driven limousine. We are cleansed of the dirt of money and sex and inequality whilst never for a moment believing it, sin is relieved by the artifice of story, image, and performance, and this makes this film as abstract as all great religious art.

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