Bride of the Wind

Writer Marilyn Levy and director Bruce Beresford chronicle the life of Alma Schindler (Sarah Wynter), who married three of 20th-century art’s giants—composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel—and carried on with many of the others. Beresford competes in vain with a disjointed script that sounds like badly translated German, a piddling budget (trying to stage World War I with four horses and a machine gun), and, worst of all, an insignificant cipher in the leading role. Wynter bears a strong resemblance to Schindler, but her performance is dull and expressionless, giving no clue what so many great artists found so fascinating—Wynter’s Alma is boring even when she’s having sex. Jonathan Pryce is good as Mahler, but too briefly, dying halfway through the film.