A dramatic-romantic movie that follows a young named Ollie Sway who is a music collector having an obsession of collecting musical records. Suddenly, he knows that his family has a rare record from the year of 1978. He decided to steal it with the help of his only friend who is a rowdy Russian drifter.
The attractiveness of the scenery, and a quiet, dignified performance by Ms. Peña in what could now be her last movie appearance, wind up being the main redeeming values here.
Despite the beauty of the imagery, The Song of Sway Lake is a film that conflates that artsy, impressionistic cinematography with profoundly deep and emotional storytelling, as if one can turn the correlation into a kind of causation.
With scenes going from detective noir, to romance, to thriller, to dry comedy drama and then back again, it all becomes tiring, without a strong enough emotional depth to the characters to warrant much of the ruminative aspect
Filmmaker Gold might have been better off keeping a tight focus on the sparring interchanges between Ollie and his grandmother, for what they tell us about past and present.
