Not the best of Walter Salles, at least as storyteller, though the visuals are as gorgeous as you could expect.Again, it's hard to assess what might have gone wrong without having read Ismail Kadare's novel (Broken April).
Taken from its original setting of the Albanian mountains to the Brazilian 'badlands' in 1910, this tale about an absurd inter-family blood-feud appears to have become rather slight in the process, of the sort that will usually hold up only a short story or novella unless it were to bulk up on either great dialogue or stylistic originality. Unfortunately, this film has neither.
For me by far the best treatment of honour killings in contemporary literature is Gabo's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a short, but great novella, which also lost much in its cinematic translation.
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