Zoltai (Andras Balint) is a Hungarian professor who returns home after a visit to the United States. Following a television interview, he commits suicide and leaves a note for his longtime friend Dr. Bardocz (Gyorgy Cserhalmi).The doctor and Zoltai’s colleague Komindi (Jozsef Madaras) join the police in investigating what drove the man to suicide in this surrealistic drama.Read More »
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Dorothy Segda essays three roles in the Hungarian-made My 20th Century. The film begins with the birth of twin girls to a Budapest mother (Dorothy Segda) in 1880. Orphaned early on, the girls are forced to sell matches on the streets until both are adopted by two separate families. Flash forward to 1900: Having lost track of one another, the grown-up twins take separate compartments on the Orient Express. One of the girls (Segda again) has become the pampered mistress of a wealthy man; the other (Segda yet again) is a bomb-wielding anarchist. Director Ildiko Enyedi evidently intended My 20th Century as an allegorical statement concerning the status of women in the modern mechanical age. The experiences of the twins are interspersed with shots of Thomas Edison (Peter Andorai), whom we see at the beginning of the film perfecting his incandescent light bulb on the very day that the sisters are born. The more technological advances made by Edison, the more confused the twins become in establishing their own roles in an advancing civilization. Adroitly avoiding cut-and-dried symbolism, Ildiko Enyedi keeps the audience wondering what she’s up to by including such surrealistic vignettes as a caged chimpanzee recounting the day of his capture!Read More »
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Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blind Chance is a powerful political fable that provides an early glimpse at the unique style that would later lead to acclaimed international successes like the Three Colors Trilogy and The Double Life of Veronique. As with the later films, Kieslowski displays a deeply erotic, sensual sensibility and a warm humanism that inflects every facet of this complex film. He also shows signs of the spiritual outlook and interest in fate and overlapping chronologies that is especially prevalent in the films he’s best known for. Blind Chance begins with a brief, elliptical precis of the early life of Witek (Boguslaw Linda), starting with a few childhood scenes, his first love, his days in medical school, and finally the death of his father. Many of these earlier memories will later be shown to be false or at least incomplete, hazily remembered scenes from the distant past that have taken on iconic status in Witek’s mind even if the particulars aren’t quite accurate.Read More »
Boldly blending personal and political histories, intercutting its fast-moving fictional scenes with documentary footage, this sort of sequel to Alexandria – Why? follows the fortunes of Chahine’s charismatic film-maker hero and alter ego, forced to review his past and learn to love himself by a critical open-heart operation. The occasionally clumsy central conceit – Yehia/Chahine standing trial for his life during surgery – is amply offset by the energy and style of this indulgent, exuberant, and immensely likeable self-portrait.Read More »
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Following his pair of despairing urban studies, A Zed and Two Noughts and The Belly of an Architect, director Peter Greenaway turned to the sardonic countryside of The Draughtsman’s Contract for another tongue-in-cheek murder yarn, Drowning by Numbers. Easily his most playful film in every sense of the term, this tricky and often charming film boasts some of his wittiest dialogue and makes for an ideal introduction for newcomers compared to his more experimental works.Read More »
Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) must face the bittersweet aches and sometimes harsh consequences of growing up when his childhood love (Loene Carmen) falls for a troubled older boy (Ben Mendelsohn) and the three whirl amidst the excitement and confusion of their own budding sexuality. Set in 1952, in a small rural town in the Australian outback, this poignant coming-of-age film beautifully captures the exquisite torture of adolescent longing and alienation. Read More »
In Dead Ringers, David Cronenberg tells the chilling story of identical twin gynecologists—suave Elliot and sensitive Beverly, bipolar sides of one personality—who share the same practice, the same apartment, the same women. When a new patient, glamorous actress Claire Niveau, challenges their eerie bond, they descend into a whirlpool of sexual confusion, drugs, and madness. Jeremy Irons’ s tour-de-force performance—as both twins—raises disturbing questions about the nature of personal identity.Read More »
Part One: Such Such Were the Joys
‘From a very early age, perhaps the age of 5 or 6, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer …One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.’
George Orwell is one of the greatest writers England has produced. Tonight and for the next four nights Arena presents a unique full-scale portrait of this remarkable man, filmed in the places where he lived and worked and told in his own words and the words of those who knew him.
The first programme traces Orwell’s upbringing in a sedate middle-class home near Henley, his horrific experiences at preparatory school, his years at Eton and as a military policeman in Burma – and closes with his sudden and dramatic emergence as a writer with Down and Out in Paris and London, a book drawn from his experiences among vagrants, tramps and outcasts. Among those appearing are Jacintha Buddicon Sir John Grotrion, Malcolm Muggeridge Cyril Connolly and Professor Bernard CrickRead More »
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She was the sort of woman who spared neither herself nor others—and arguably qualifies as 20th-century France’s greatest femme de lettres. In this interview, the late novelist and filmmaker talks openly about the hardship and the romance of her childhood in French Indochina, sharing how this period haunted her life and shaped her work. Excerpts from her films and readings from her books by actress Elizabeth Rider and Duras herself—including The Lover, winner of the Prix Goncourt and translated into more than forty languages—bring to life those formative years in Vietnam. (52 minutes)Read More »