Der Tag des Falken

Es hat seinen Charme, ich kann die Aufregung darum und den Durchbruch in Michelles und Rutgers Karrieren verstehen. Aber ich persönlich leide ziemlich darunter, denn das Märchenhafte wird durch den völlig unpassenden Soundtrack und die zweckdienlichen Äußerlichkeiten zunichte gemacht. (17.03.2010)

My unreliable memory knew best. From my childhood years, I remembered Ladyhawke as a whispery, fatally dark, and atypically brutal spectacle. Dark and whispery probably because of the poor quality of our VHS copy, and the rest of my impressions were probably influenced by the fact that after the entire film, what stayed in my mind were the peculiar transformation scenes and especially the fatally gothic ending. Suddenly, the horrible synthesizers and the insufferable Broderick fall silent, and only the clashing of heavy swords and the impact of hooves on the church pavement echoes in the cathedral. Whereas this almost silent conclusion lasts maybe twenty minutes. Similarly, the tragic figure of the negative bishop, who sold his soul to the Devil because of a morbid consuming love, not because of worldly ambition or anything like that, works here even after all these years. The general enormity of love in this film is respectably functional enough that, by the nature of the plot, it contains a minimum of the usual common conventional scenes of displays of emotion. It's a shame we have to watch it from the position of a beleaguered pickpocket through cheesy and stagy narrative, and that what plays into that plays into it. (02.02.2021)