I hesitate to use the term old-fashioned or old school (‘skool’ if we’re appropriating street slang), but it’s how I’d best describe this charming movie. It has a genuine warmth and innocence about it, a throwback to one of those risible but irresistible fairy tales.
The period continues to fascinate, and the film captures with elan the brittle precariousness of the era. Pre-war Vienna, that gilded pan-European late age of modernism, decadent Austria-Hungary’s last-chance saloon before the Great War and destroyer of empires. Something like that.
And the wonderful Eddie Marsan is in it.
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 