Stephen Farber

“Still, at a time when most movies try so little, there’s something to be said for a movie that tries to do too much. Some of Dassin’s indiscriminately aimed darts manage to hit the bull’s eye. Mercouri is more restrained than usual, and she has riveting moments… However, the most effective moments belong to Ellen Burstyn as the simple, uneducated housewife who went berserk when she learned that her husband planned to leave her for a younger woman. Burstyn makes the monstrous comprehensible. In contemplating the tragedy of a woman who built her life around her husband, we feel both pity and terror. In its horrific, extreme way the film reflects all the recent questioning of the religion of domesticity. The flashback sequence of Burstyn’s murder of her children is shattering, but it’s a sure-fire scene, one that couldn’t miss. The same might be said of the film as a whole: The sheer power of the subject overrides the awkwardness of the execution. Although A Dream of Passion is riddled with flaws, you won’t forget that you’ve seen it.”

Stephen Farber
New West, November 6, 1978