Testing love is like testing faith in the biblical sense--it's probably not a good idea. In the opera Cosi Fan Tutte two young men, arrogant that their lovers are true, wage a bet to test them. Seems like a bad idea, eh? Anytime someone asks you to test an article of faith with a wager, I would lay odds back to you that this person has inside knowledge that they will win. They're betting on your arrogance.
So why test love? Like the poet Heather McHugh says: "Just feel until you feel felt." If you don't test that love, how do you know that the love is there? It's like that feeling one gets when meditating, or just laying still--where your body disappears. How do you know your body is still there? Best to move your arm. It may ruin the illusion of your body being gone, but it will also reassure you that it hasn't altogether left you.
Cosi Fan Tutte plays a minor role in this film, being the opera that Jude Law and Julia Roberts miss seeing. I doubt they would have paid attention anyway. They probably would have talked through the whole thing and been shushed. These characters are the special sort of people for whom their own exquisite tortures are the fabric of life. They constantly work at weaving them, and only seem happy right before they tear a finished square back to bare thread.
Much can be said about the acting, which was right on mark, and extremely well directed. Portman was good and bold, and I'm glad she's distancing herself a bit from the Amidala role, as well as the cutesy type of roles that her good looks might lend themselves too. I like seeing Jude Law fail occasionally, he plays the winner so well. About Julia Roberts, well--I'm a little unsure of her. She has gracious star power and beauty, but what's interesting is that we learn mostly about her character from the observations of Clive Owen. We're almost sure that he's wrong about her, until she does exactly what he expects exactly when he expects it. In this movie, his arrogance is the mark of the bet worth taking.
A movie like this makes the world of relationships so confusing that my head is spinning thinking about the unclear, dramatically operatic ways at which the characters played each other. That's the goal, I think. The more confused your opponents are, the longer it'll take for them to learn that you just made off with their wallet. They call it a confidence game, said David Mamet in House of Games, not because you give your confidence to the con man, but because he gives his confidence to you.
Where we saw it: Movie Theater | We deign to rate it: 85 outta 100