Solomon and Gaenor (1999)

Premise: On his first day as a packman, Solomon (Ioan Gruffudd) meets the beautiful Gaenor (Nia Roberts). In order to pursue a relationship with her, Jewish Solomon pretends to be the English Sam Livingston. Because no one tells a lie in a movie for no reason, his secret threatens their relationship as Gaenor develop a secret of her own. I should mention that it's Wales in 1911.

Alright, so I'll admit that I was initially a little weary of this movie. My dear Ioan, despite being a very talented and sexy young man, is very often in crap movies. It's just the way it is.

So I watched the preview right before I watched the movie, as is my wont. Not only did excite me for what followed, it also pointed out that the movie won a bunch of awards and nominations, including a nod for best Foreign Language Film at the 2000 Academy Awards. I can assure you that I thought, "What kind of a foreign language is English?" Then I remembered the fluent Yiddish Ioan learned for this part, and I surrendered the sneer. Turns out that another third, I would say, of the film is in Welsh. Complicated stuff, I tell ya.

The other two previews were for East-West, which was an actually good movie that I had to watch for school, and the actual Foreign Language winner for that year, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother. So, I gotta admit, I was all the more excited for it.

Excitement that paid off, which I thought was something that just didn't happen any more. I find that really good and really bad movies have one thing in common: they stick with you. After I saw Alexander, I was moaning about for weeks about what a terrible movie it was. With this film, I get little flashes of it in my head, and I find myself caught up in heartbreak or elation, depending on the scene. It's really quite refreshing.

Gruffudd and Roberts stole my heart from the get-go, him for bringing the kind of passion and restraint I love him for and her for being strong, loyal, and feisty. Roberts delivers the kind of tour de force performance that the rest of us only dream of witnessing, and Gruffudd keeps everything in check to balance it out. It's smolderingly wonderful and tragic to watch the two of them together.

Writer-director Paul Morrison had me in knots over each challenge the couple faced, and he also had me yelling at the screen. It was another adventure in the arrogance of youth, as well as one in finding yourself. In this case, they both do find themselves by curtain call. His screenplay and direction have their telling moments, but he hides it well for the most part, creating more tragedy with every passing frame in his Romeo and Juliet story.

Morrison has created something spellbinding through his fantastic leads. Damp looking Wales calls you back through the fog with stories of such passion that you can do little but weep. For my part, I could do naught but fall silent. A

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