Film Reviews by SC

Bringing Up Baby although 50+ years old is still as fresh as ever. Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn are at their acting prime. Their comic timing is interplanetary travelling perfect. The story gets more and more complicated, but one never loses track of its development. Baby is nothing else but a young tame leopard_ or should I say two? because at one point a not-so-tame leopard joins the fray. There are misunderstandings and mishaps galore. The gags, both verbal and physical pile upon one another at vertiginous speed, and help make this an accomplished Hollywood comedy, to rank with Some Like it Hot, or The Apartment.

The playing of the film is marred by the mixture of Swedish and English, with subtitles only available for the Swedish dialogue. It would have been much better if there were also subtitles when the characters spoke English.

Kore Eda has been busy these last few years, and his films are always eminently watchable. He must have realised that he needed to work on the characters involved in this child-swapping drama. So we have a stuck-up city man on the one hand, and a laid-back Okinawan on the other. Eda, rightly I think, chose to make the two mothers take the back seat, because he wanted to pit the two men against the other. I do not think one should read anything anti-feminist in this. Once the swap has been established, the story develops along predictable lines, but if this means fewer dramas, the plot lines develop smoothly and intelligently.