Watching Florian is kind of like watching a pinball machine.
It just keeps bouncing all over the place and you start out with one initial setting and then move on to another.
I was originally going to talk about a love triangle that started up in the beginning of the movie and how I found it comedic that it was more-or-less created by Royal Decree of Franz Joseph himself. But then the movie decides: ''No we don't need this random love triangle anymore'' The ballerina girl (who you'd think would be more prevalent given that she's on the freaking poster) just disappears thrum the rest of the film.
It wasn't like she was a nobody to begin with. She had a lot of scenes, she made up more screen time and the other girl and she even had an entire dance number.
But then she's just gone and that's the end of it.
I was a little disappointed by that given she was really the only character I was interested in watching. She was manipulative and kind of vulgar at times and partially responsible for some of the drama that happens later on. But she was the only one with any true conviction to her. Everyone else was just kind of going along with the flow while she was out there and eccentric.
But it's all irrelevant as literally The Great War starts and the entire movie switches into an entirely new genre. That of revolution, poverty, sneaking and general misery.
Then changing gears again as we move on to New York where the horse ends up having been bought by an American Enterprise who was able to purchase extravagantly wealthy Austrian merchandise for relatively cheap prices do to hyperinflation.
Then the whole film just turns into a giant search as Anton (the supposed protagonist and guy who raised the horse) goes on a journey to try and find out what happens to the only remnants of his old life.
And peppered throughout this entire ordeal is this kind of on-again off-again relationship between an Antom and The Duchess. This young woman who's taking a liking to the horse as it's supposed to be betrothed to the emperor himself.
But then the horse is given to this other royal guy who's also supposed to Marry The Duchess, thus crushing the dreams of Anton who's going to lose both the love of his life and his horse.
But as I said earlier The War starts up, the Royal man dies (kind of undeservedly if you ask me. He was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud but he didn't deserve to die.) and Anton ends up in prison after escorting The Duchess to Switzerland to keep her safe from the Revolutionary forces.
Eventually all three of these characters find themselves in New York at the same spot after countless searching by Anton for his horse and eventually having the (former) Duchess searching for the two after she finds out about the horse in a newspaper.
And this poor horse goes through hell as well. It serves in the Great War, it gets shipped away to a Spanish breeding house where it becomes miserable. It's brought to America and put an unsanitary conditions, it's beaten and abused. with sores on it and only becomes happy when it finally sees Anton for the last time before almost being shipped off to god-knows-where.
When I say ''God knows where'' I mean it.
This 'low-grade' service horse taken to a coal mine or perhaps a Banana Republic. And this is at a time when these places are still pretty much glorified slave colonies were people grow sugar in a most unpleasant style and a horse would get to suffer just as much of the locals there too.
But It ultimately turns out okay for the horse as he's reunited with the only two people he ever liked.
Then they get married, the film wraps up really nicely.
It's only an hour and 20 minutes long but it feels significantly longer than that.
And that's not a negative in this case.
The movie is well-paced, it just has so much going on that you kind of get exhausted by all the new destinations.
It was a surprisingly decent movie especially considering I was looking down on it after the first 10 minutes.
I thought it was going to be this sub-par love story that had to have a horse as its Central plot device. But it drops all that and ultimately become something else.
I also realise the irony in complaining about the original story given that the character I wanted to see more of that ballerina Girl drops off the face of the Earth after 30 minutes.
I guess there's no pleasing the critic sometimes.
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