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List Price: $29.95 | | Label: Sony Pictures
Salesrank: 29000
Released: December 10, 2002 |
| Our Price: $2.12 |
| Used Price: $0.87 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
This tender tale of love reignited begins when Andreas (Charles Tingwell) writes a letter to Claire (Julia Blake), the girl he loved in his youth. Though they've married other people (Andreas's wife has died) and had children who are now adults, when they meet again, the passion they once felt returns. But when Claire tells her husband, John (Terry Norris), he's devastated; his struggle to hold on to Claire threatens to ruin all of their lives. Innocence is quiet and slow paced, giving it a calm reflection on love and mortality that turns, sometimes unexpectedly, to heartbreaking sadness. The actors are excellent, particularly Blake, who makes the risks Claire takes feel as immediate and unexpected as they would feel to a teenager. --Bret Fetzer
Innocence Reviews:
The only way to live is to love. 
2007-11-17 - If you come away from this movie with anything at all, let it be that statement - one of the last made by Claire, who has loved well, if perhaps not always too wisely. But yet, she followed her heart, and was true to herself. That is not an easy thing to do or to be. Especially once you've reached that certain age, when one is automatically supposed to be imbued with extra wisdom.
To love and be loved, to experience passion - even if only for a brief time - is the most wonderful thing in the world, and this movie brilliantly captures the essence of such a love. Liesurely, almost languid in the telling, Andreas and Claire were privileged to recapture their younger love, for a brief shining moment. We should all hope for as much. There is more to life than an unhappy marriage. Staying together to stay together when there is no love is deceitful and harmful to the participants.
This is a gorgeously executed film about love--at any age. I suppose it's true that younger people might lose patience with it anti-hectic approach, but they're the ones who should pay the most attention. Someday, it'll be their turn, and with any luck at all, they can experience what transpired between Claire and Andreas. This is indeed a love story for the ages. All of them.
Its heart's in the right placed; now if I could just find where the other stuff is... 
2007-08-13 - If you are under the age of 50, you might pass this movie by. I think that the criticisms leveled by others regarding this film are generally deserved, I agree with most of them; however, as I am an aged, spavined, tattered and torn ex-Romeo myself, I gave it an extra star for its attempt at clarity. I really do think that you have to be older to appreciate what this movie - short on good writing and amateurishly acted by the lead male though it is - is about. It tends, at times, to be didactic, especially in some of the rather stilted conversations about God, but it does open to the screen an area of experience that is very close to the bone for those of us supposedly past our primes. Movies are always less and more than meets the eye, and this is no exception. For me this film, however weak in some areas it is, was touching and real. I was always aware of what it was lacking, but at the same time I was taken with its boldness in evaluating human love and sexuality in people over the age normally reserved for this kind of scrutiny. It's painfully lacking in humor (a huge and glaring deficit), and I think the writer and director took what they had to say much too seriously, but this ultimately does not detract from the truths it exposes. For all its faults, I do recommend it to those of us who have arrived at that moment when getting out of a chair has become a painful and tricky business.
Innocence
2007-07-20 - This sweet, tender December/December romance executes its tricky premise with finesse and feeling, thanks to sensitive handling by director Paul Cox. Most poignant is the juxtaposition of the revived romance with images of Andreas and Claire's earlier passion, when their whole adult lives lay before them. Though Tingwell seems a bit rickety for Andreas, his performance still resonates, but Blake steals it as Claire, a woman facing unexpected joy- and pain- late in life.
Big Disappointment 
2006-11-21 - I certainly should have paid more attention to the description of this movie, so I blame myself for my ignorance in buying it. However, I "listened" to all the reviews that talk about what a wonderful story this is. Not so. Rekindled love is one thing, but cheating on one's spouse is another. That makes the rekindled love cheap and cruel and heartless. Having been cheated on by my first husband, I do not see the "beauty" of this "heartfelt" film of love. It is not at all right to justify cheating on a husband or wife. It is beyond devastating, and it is not at all innocent.
Love and Mortality
2006-01-18 - Well, when I finished watching this movie at 1 AM I was crying (I am a straight man but I allow myself to cry). I cried about the condition of humanity. Humans are capable of such great love towards another person, but eventually they die and they die FOREVER. I as the main character of the movie do not belief in the life after death, after which we can reunite with our loved one. I adhere literally to the following biblical truism: "From dust we come, to dust we shall return". We cannot relive our life with the loved one. Once our years are gone they are gone. And there is nothing after death. I know that the movie tries to convey a message of hope, and knowing that that hope is vain makes me cry even more...
