Julie Walters stars as a single mother seemingly haunted by a sinister telephone system that seems to have become an evil intelligence in its own right.
Roger Daltrey of The Who stars as 19th century genius pianist Franz Liszt in this brash, loud and free-wheeling rock 'n' roll fantasia centered around an imagined rivalry between Liszt and composer Richard Wagner-- painted here as a vampiric harbinger of doom and destruction.
The film fictionalizes the real relationship between French sculptor Henri Gaudier and Polish writer Sophie Brzeska, twenty years his senior, who came to Paris, she says, for its “creative atmosphere.”
In a small Jewish community in a pre-Revolutionary Russian village, a poor milkman, determined to find good husbands for his five daughters, consults the traditional matchmaker – and also has words with God.
A married man with two small children begins an affair with a beautiful young actress which quickly blossoms into a full blown romance, until she tells him that she is only 15 years old…
Russell's composer biopics were usually labours of love. This was the opposite: he regarded Strauss's music as "bombastic, sham and hollow", and despised the composer for claiming to be apolitical while cosying up to the Nazi regime. The film depicts Strauss in a variety of grotesquely caricatured situations: attacked by nuns after adopting Nietzsche's philosophy, he fights duels with jealous husbands, literally batters his critics into submission with his music and glorifies the women in his life and fantasies. (BFI Screenonline)
