Posted in 9b-2010 Reviews, England, Italy on Jan 12th, 2011
Screenwriter Hossein Amini has abandoned the dense prose and convoluted syntax of Henry James’s most complex and difficult novel and created instead a fresh, emotionally nuanced, and psychologically astute script, nominated for an Academy Award. With a remarkable cast, breathtaking cinematography (Eduardo Serra), and a soft background score filled with strings, harp, and piano (Edward Shearmur), Director Iain Softley has created a magnificent film that succeeds in being emotionally affecting, intellectually stimulating, and aesthetically rewarding, a film in which every element contributes to a satisfying whole. Remaining true to the story of James’s novel, the film introduces Kate Croy (Helena Bonham Carter) as the beautiful but impoverished niece of a wealthy socialite (Charlotte Rampling), bent upon finding her a husband of means, but Kate must sever ties with her opium-addicted father and end her relationship with Merton Densher (Linus Roache), a penniless journalist.
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The cruelties of life, both deliberate and accidental, play out with delicious irony in this very dark precursor to the modern noir novel. An elderly brother and his three aging sisters, all physically and emotionally maimed, are required, under the terms of their mother’s will, to share the rapidly deteriorating family estate, Durraghglass, near Cork, Ireland. Each of the Swift family members, firmly controlled by “Mummie” and her memory, leads an almost totally isolated, secret-filled life, unable to share feelings or care for anyone else. Their already precarious lives are tested with the unexpected arrival of Leda, a formerly glamorous, half-Jewish cousin from Austria, whom they all thought “perished in some cold, unnamed camp, most likely. Who wants sordid details?” Irony builds upon irony as Leda’s actions and remarks, often misunderstood, succeed in turning one sibling against another.
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Posted in Hungary, Italy on Jan 11th, 2011
Escaping in 1756, after sixteen months in a Venice jail, Giacomo Casanova, “all seven deadly sins in one accursed body,” arrives in Bolzano, where the Doge and the Inquisition cannot reach him. Seeing himself as “that rare creature, a writer with a life to write about,” he and a defrocked priest, Balbi, move into a hotel, not far from where the Duke of Parma and his young bride Francesca reside. Casanova was wounded by the duke in a duel over Francesca three years before and has promised never to see her again. When the Duke arrives at Casanova’s hotel with a letter from Francesca, asking to see him, the stage is set for the action and a surprising ending.
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An extended Anglo-Irish family living in the vicinity of Dublin on the eve of the Easter Rebellion of 1916 reflects the attitudes and pressures that lead eventually to the cataclysmic events at the Dublin Post Office. Andrew Chase-White, a young officer in the British Cavalry, has been assigned to Dublin, where he has often spent holidays and where he has an almost-fiancee. His idolized cousin Patrick Dumay, “the iron man,” is secretly a member of the Irish Volunteers and an admirer of Padraig Pearse. His teenaged cousin, hot-headed Cathal, supports the Citizen’s Army under James Connolly. As the action unfolds throughout the week leading to the uprising, the family interacts on several levels, revealing their mores, their dreams for the future of Ireland, their occasional tendency to look for religious significance in political destiny, and their personal hopes and failings.
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When the monsoon rains wash a whole village of massacred babies, men, and women down the swollen river and past a small, peaceful community on India’s border with the newly created Pakistani state, the residents of the village are aghast. When whole trains of newly slaughtered Sikhs and Hindus, not a passenger still alive, start arriving in their village from Muslim Pakistan, they hastily cremate and bury the remains, then retire to the temple in shock. When their own Muslim friends from the village are forcibly evacuated to Pakistan on ten minutes’ notice, the villagers know that the fabric of their lives is changed forever. With the immediacy of an on-the-spot observer to these events of 1947 and the passion of a sensitive writer impelled to tell a story, Singh mourns the seemingly permanent loss of compassion and tolerance which accompanied the separation of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu/Sikh India and Muslim Pakistan. (To read the full review, click on the title of this excerpt.)
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