Pretty to look at, _Behind the Sun_ is nonetheless typical of the painfully conservative international films Miramax increasingly chooses to bring to U.S. audiences. Its symbolism is obvious and heavy-handed, its dialogue melodramatic, and its performances insultingly broad. It conforms perfectly to the feel-good foreign fluff that has flooded the market at least since _Cinema Paradisio_; that is, it embodies to a "t" the safe, lowest-common-denominator American conception of what a foreign film "should" be. As a result of Miramax's market dominance, more dynamic international films that seek to surprise us or advance film language in some way get marginalized, going largely unseen in the U.S.