dorothy-tripp If you like dark dramas, this is your movie. Very true to the book and absolutely engrossing. The locations are beautiful. The acting is superb. The characters are richly brought out, and you can understand their thought processes. This is a moral play, as well as a look at the way society imposes rules of conduct. I stumbled on this wonderful film while watching the romance channel on television in 2000. I came in toward the middle, but was immediately drawn into the story. I searched high and low for the video, and when I want a moody drama, this is where I go. This film will make you think. Obviously, the book is practically required reading after you see this movie. You'll just be compelled to know more. Truly a haunting movie that you will remember for a long time.

IridescentTranquility How to summarise Jude? They say that in the late Victorian era there was a school of thought that almost glorified the state of childhood, believing it to be a perfect time in a person's life when innocence reigned, but I don't believe Thomas Hardy followed this line of thinking. No matter how young, both Jude the father and Jude the son seem weighed down by doom and misery in this film.I think this film fell under the category of "independent film", which is just as well. Following the Thomas Hardy convention whereby nothing can end happily, Jude ultimately ends with a miserable mood, but in a sense this is perfect. Although it's not the sort of film anyone would want to watch on a "down" day, I'm sure that - had this film been given the Hollywood treatment, the storyline would have been mercilessly rearranged to have a loving happy ending. The problem is, if that happened, it wouldn't be Hardy.There is something stark about the opening of the film - the scratchy music, the loneliness of the solitary young Jude, the clattering noise of the bird-scarer and yet, combined with the black-and-white filming, it evokes the appropriate mood for the film so easily and so early on. In amongst the winter scenes and the aerial shots that show only a tiny bit of movement in an otherwise still landscape, Jude and Arabella's wedding is possibly the busiest, most colourful scene in the whole film. Of course, there are also many interesting social and sometimes political issues raised, partly because of the time in which the film is set. Had the story been moved forward a hundred years, there would be nothing remarkable about Sue attending lectures, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer in the pub, visiting Jude without a chaperone. There would be nothing surprising about being educated when you had a job - like Jude's - that didn't require it. But Jude and Sue are tragic in a way - both impulsive people in a world and a time when a commitment like marriage was not to be taken lightly.There are many bad omens in the film - Aunt Drusilla remarking that "The Fawleys were not meant for marrying" - and the particular tragedy of Jude's character is the way he rushes into things only to regret them later. Though Jude is tragic, his cousin and partner Sue is equally blighted - to watch her change during the film from an irreverent, sparky, impertinent, independent single woman into a tortured, guilty (in her own eyes) shadow of her former self is heartbreaking. Although in some ways women's lives and opportunities were limited in various ways in the nineteenth century, as a female with a job, no husband and no parents or other family, she did have quite a lot of freedom. Oddly, Jude's wife Arabella is not so different from Sue - she is as forward and daring physically as Sue is intellectually. During their marriage, she and Jude almost reverse roles - she goes out to kill a pig single-handedly when he is too sensitive to do so. There is an interesting contrast between Jude's sex scenes with Arabella and the one he has with Sue. The wedding night with Arabella is warmly lit and cosy, whereas the scene with Sue is stark, almost grey, with a cold feeling and yet in some ways Sue and Jude are more necessary to each other than Arabella and Jude ever were. On the costume side I note that - as with the more recent Kate Winslet film Finding Neverland - the costumes don't look like fashion plates, they look like real clothes (occasionally none too clean but when you take into account how time-consuming and labour-intensive it must have been to wash them, it's hardly surprising). It seems strange now that Kate must only have been twenty or twenty-one when this film was made - in her first scene she looks mature whereas in others she seems very, very young.This isn't the easiest film to watch - there are a few sections I almost always fast-forward - but that is not to say it's not good. Every time I watch it, a bit of me wants things to end happily, but - as I said before - that just wouldn't be Hardy.

Kevin Gillette The gentleman from the UK who commented on the film and said that he hadn't read the book is very intuitive regarding the book's motive force - and quite correct!Thomas Hardy (my favorite author) wrote many of his novels as searing polemic against the institutions of Victorian English society. Hardy was a modern thinker, and felt that the societal strictures that predestined people to riches or servitude were abhorrent in the extreme.It seems evident that the film was suggestive enough of this agenda, so on that score the film is successful.

etiennestcyr Words can not describe the emotions that you get by watching this movie. I did not know anything about it before it was shown on TV a few years ago. But by luck, i stumbled on it and i'm still revisiting some scenes, months after the viewing ! I basically never cry during emotional, and hard scenes, but this time i could not contain myself. You know things are going all wrong for the couple and you're rooting for them from the start but it just keeps coming and coming...Apart from the emotions, i truly loved the acting and also really enjoyed the historic side.A solid 9 (i never give 10's) that i would recommend anytime ! You'll be touched, i guarantee !