“If you had to choose between me and your mother, who would it be?” Capitu asks provocatively of her problematic lover. Elsewhere, they dance to inaudible music, with their friends, each couple keeping to a rhythm of their own. At times, this depiction of the memories we see one Dom Casmurro commit to paper with a flamboyant pen seems to be an interplay of conflicting emotions – particularly when jealousy raises its head.Read More »
The film traces the life and times of Wenceslau de Moraes (b. Lisbon 1854, d. Tokushima 1929), the great Portuguese writer who lived in the Far East. 1891: Moraes breaks with his mistress and leaves Portugal for Macao, never to return. 1895: While in Macao, he becomes fascinated by Japan, leaving his Chinese wife and their two children. 1912: Moraes is living and writing in Robe, in the south of Japan, as Portuguese Consul, with his Japanese wife Oyone. 1913-16: Deeply affected by the death of Oyone, Moraes quits his post and goes to live in poverty, near the tomb of his wife. However, he soon becomes involved with a young niece of Oyone’s, Ko-Haru, who eventually dies of tuberculosis. 1916-29: Moraes is transformed into a ghostly figure, wandering at night around the graves of Oyone and Ko-Haru. He writes his most mature works at this time, while his literary fame continues to grow in Portugal. 1929: Moraes dies under obscure circumstances.Read More »
Quote:
Some filmmakers have difficulty traveling between the short format and feature films, the former more often than not feeling like exercises, excerpts, or condensations, or the latter, in rarer cases (given the relative death of the short format some 60-odd years ago) seeming simply like brief ideas outstaying their welcome. The aesthetic of writer/director Eugène Green is so clean and simple in this age of image saturation and hyper-abundant kinetics that his “mini-film” Les Signes feels as natural and fluid as his fascinating longer features like 2004’s Le Pont des Arts and 2003’s miniature knight’s tale, Le Monde Vivant. Read More »
IMDB:
A man faces a trial for murder. The court is biased because of his personal qualities.Read More »
Quote:
The film tells a romantic love story set against the background of Tajik Civil War (1992-1996.) Curfews and bursts of tracer bullets piercing the night hardly seem compatible with a love story. In this strange and dangerous time the men of the city are all into gambling. Everybody gambles with everybody. The situation reaches absurd proportions when the main protagonist wins a young woman from her father. Not knowing what to do, the man decides to take the girl into his shlelter – a cable-car station in the mountains. The war seems far away, but soon it reaches even the apparently peaceful refuge as well. The film conveys the atmosphere of war-torn Dushanbe, the spirit of its citizens strengthened by the hardships and absurdities of the strange war. The film was awarded the “Silver Lion” at the International Film Festival in Venice in 1993, the Grand Prix in Saint Petersbourg – 94, and altogether has been screened at over 30 international film festivals.Read More »
Wie ein Vogel auf dem Draht (1974)
“A pseudo variety show about the Aufbau-Era, the time of the German “economic miracle,” when Kondrad Adenauer was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (1949-63). Songs are sung and Brigitte Mira tells a few jokes.”Read More »
KAFFEEHAUS, DAS
(nach Carlo Goldoni)
“In Ridolfo’s coffeehouse, citizens meet to talk about money, friendship, love, and honor. This is a modernistic staging for television of a play by Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793), the Venetian playwright whose many works preserve in scripted form the improvisational productions of the Italian commedia dell’arte.”Read More »
A shy maths graduate takes a holiday in Dinard before starting his first job. He hopes his sort-of girlfriend will join him, but soon strikes up a friendship with another girl working in town. She in turn introduces him to a further young lady who fancies him. Thus the quiet young lad finds he is having to do some tricky juggling in territory new to him.Read More »
Het Witte Kasteel (1973)
Part of Johan van der Keuken’s North/South series, The White Castle focuses on the impact of the West on the underclass: on the concrete realities of their daily life and on the way their existence is isolated and frustrated. Interweaving images of the Spanish tourist mecca of Formentera, a community center in Columbus, Ohio, and factories in the Netherlands, the film vividly illustrates the fragmented, alienated lives that the market economy produces and chillingly portrays what van der Keuken saw as “a conveyor belt [that] runs across the world.”Read More »