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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

‘Head in the Clouds’ is overblown


 Penelope Cruz as Mia, left, Charlize Theron as Gilda and Stuart Townsend as Guy in
Jami Bernard New York Daily News

Naming a big-screen sex addict “Gilda” is really asking for it.

Charlize Theron’s Gilda in “Head in the Clouds” invites comparison to Rita Hayworth in 1946’s “Gilda,” which adds a touch of the ludicrous to this already strained material set in wartime France.

Writer-director John Duigan pours on the melodrama in an implausible story that enfolds kinky sex with nationalistic fervor. It feels like a big movie as it swings across Europe during the years leading into and through World War II, making comments about the personal and the political. But it also feels small because its characters seem torn between heroics and making like dirty French postcards.

Theron’s Gilda, who is told by a fortune teller that she’ll die young, is a desperate, fearful, driven woman who uses sex to shut out the noise in her head.

But this is not Gilda’s story, which is perhaps why we never get a bead on her, except as someone with really great hair and outfits. Instead, the pro-

tagonist is Guy (Stuart Townsend), an earnest Irish lad with a social conscience.

Guy can’t forget the pool table where Gilda first infected him with a lifelong desire that leads him to take ridiculous risks. After a blissful year living in a Paris apartment with Gilda and her equally luscious roommate (Penelope Cruz), Guy signs up to fight the Fascists in Spain.

But he keeps coming back to Gilda, even when she’s busy entertaining gentlemen callers who torture French Resistance fighters in their spare time.

The way Gilda’s fate shakes out is preposterous, but really no less so than everything that has come before – and perhaps no less than in patriotic Hollywood dramas such as “Notorious.” Gilda is a cartoon next to her two more serious roommates, but, as Jessica Rabbit once said, she’s not really bad, she’s just drawn that way.