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Poster for Gertrud

Gertrud

1964 · 1h 59m · Not Rated Drama, Romance
Directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer

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Overview

Hopeless romantic Gertrud inhabits a turn-of-the-century milieu of artists and musicians, where she pursues an idealized notion of love that will always elude her. She abandons her distinguished husband and embraces an affair with a young concert pianist, who falls short of her desire for lasting affection. When an old lover returns to her life, fresh disappointments follow, and Gertrud must try to come to terms with reality.

Director and cast

Critics on Rotten Tomatoes

Top critics, in their words

All reviews
71%
Tomatometer
Fresh

It's exquisite, unbearable, and unforgettable.

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Fresh

Dreyer's film depicts repressed carnal desires that merge with Gertrud's inevitably frustrated spiritual one: the longing for a love so total and consuming that it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Richard Brody, New Yorker
Fresh

Nina Pens Rode has the right luminous quality for the romantic, uncompromising Gertrud, while the men are acceptable if sometimes overindulgent in their roles.

Variety Staff, Variety
Fresh

One of the most purely cinematic discourses of the 1960s.

Tony Rayns, Time Out
Rotten

In his best films there has always been an underlying human concern that sustained us through any longueurs of execution. Here, under the slow, posed pictures, there is nothing but the dated theme described above.

Stanley Kauffmann, New York Times

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