Charlotte Rampling in Signs & Wonders (2000)

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Signs & Wonders (2000) is one of the artier "art house" films I have seen this year. Stellan Skarsgård as Alec is married to Charlotte Rampling, and has a son and a daughter. He finds portent in the most trivial of things, such as sewer covers, and then makes life decisions based on what he has divined. He works in Athens as an investment broker, and is banging a woman in the office. It looks like that will end when he confesses the affair to Rampling. Later, he meets her on a ski slope, and decides that fate wants him with the girlfriend, so he divorces Rampling and moves to the US with the girlfriend. That doesn't last long, however, when the girlfriend admits she set him up, and the meeting wasn't a chance encounter.

Naturally, he goes back to Athens and lets Rampling know that he intends to reunite the family. The fact that she is engaged to a former Greek dissident and activist doesn't faze him much at all. His son is on the side of the Greek, but his daughter is on his side. Rampling shows her breasts in a sex scene near the end of the film with Alec, then meets her Greek to marry him. Trouble is, it is a really hard watch, and painfully slow. It is not always clear to me what was happening, there was no hint as to why the characters became what they were, and I had the feeling from start to finish that it was dripping with symbolism, but I couldn't decipher the symbols. It is decidedly not a film for the masses. C-.

Nudity Report: Rampling shows her breasts in a sex scene near the end of the film with Alec.

Critics Vote: The film was nominated for a Golden Bear in Berlin. It is a critic's sort of movie, as evidenced by Ebert's 3 stars. 63% of the top critics gave it a positive at IMDb.

IMDB Summary: IMDb readers say 5.6 of 10.

DVD Info: The DVD transfer was mushy and oversaturated.


Written by: Tuna …courtesy of Scoopy.net