ClarkeFountain-AllMovieGuide wrote:
Utamaro was an artist who lived in Edo (which was later to become modern-day Tokyo) in the late 18th century. This film, which has a complex and wide-ranging storyline, recreates the world of that time, as it appeared in Utamaro’s paintings. In one the many scenes captured by the story, Utamaro watches the goings-on in a brothel while hidden in its attic.Read More »
Synopsis:
Two parallel stories about two identical women; one living in Poland, the other in France. They don’t know each other, but their lives are nevertheless profoundly connected.
Review:
It is important to resist the temptation to figure out every last detail of “The Double Life of Veronique,” the mysterious and poetic new film by Krzysztof Kieslowski. That way lies frustration.Read More »
Lucia is a young woman who works as a seamstress in a factory and lives with her father in an old house in Santiago, Chile. The film occurs in December 2006 during the weeks that take place from the ex-dictator Pinochet’s funeral to Christmas. Through the simple observation of Lucia’s daily life, the spectator is allowed access into a hidden and neglected world of a generation of Chileans striving to recover from the military dictatorship.Read More »
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Agnes Varda directed this drama which combines formal dramatic structures with the openness of improvisational cinema verite. Independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke plays an avant-garde film director attempting to work with a major studio to finance her next project, in which she hopes to collaborate with James Rado and Jerome Ragni, creators of the musical Hair (who play themselves). She also wants to use Andy Warhol superstar Viva (who also appears as herself) as her leading lady. However, after much give and take between herself and the moneymen, the director learns that the plug has been pulled on her project, pushing her to the brink of suicide.Read More »
Mon oncle d’Amérique (“My American Uncle”) is a 1980 French film directed by Alain Resnais. The film stars Gérard Depardieu, Nicole Garcia, and Roger Pierre.
The didactic film is built around the ideas of French physician, writer and philosopher Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film. It uses the stories of three people to illustrate Laborit’s theories on evolutionary psychology regarding the relationship of self and society.Read More »
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Adapted from the short stories of Gyula Krúdy, a beloved Proustian author of the Magyars, Szindbád is an autumnal, reflective, and poetic film set during fin de siècle Hungary, and centers on a dying libertine’s thoughts and memories. Although named after the character in One Thousand and One Nights, Szindbad is more of a wilting Casanova. A womanizer and a gourmand, he both regrets and revels in his past pursuits of the flesh and stomach. Counter to the long shot, long take aesthetic that’s the default mode for European art cinema then and now, Huszárik—a graphic artist and painter as well—opts for montage editing. Haptic inserts, rich in sensuality and eroticism, of water droplets, globules of food oil, and blooming flowers, are counterpoised with the film’s melancholic tone channeled through Szindbád. A life lived purely for pleasure never seemed so gloomily romantic.Read More »
Three women meet by chance at the end of the world, in Argentinian Patagonia, and set out on a polyamorous journey, caught up in the search for new kinds of relationships, far from possession and pain. They become the Daughters of Fire, a band dedicated to helping those women who look for their own path to erotica.Read More »
Henry Darger, an elderly recluse, spent his childhood in an Illinois asylum for feeble-minded children and his adulthood working as a janitor. He lived a quiet, nearly solitary existence, but his imaginary life was exciting, colorful and sexually provocative. When he died in Chicago in 1973, his landlady discovered in his room 300 paintings, some over 10 feet long, and a 15,000-page illustrated novel (The Realms Of The Unreal), which told the epic story of the virtuous Vivian Girls, seven angelic sisters who lead a rebellion against godless, child-enslaving men.Read More »
Four young Germans in a Soviet POW camp decide to join the Red Army to hasten the end of the war. Their new identities elicit different reactions from Germans and Russians and are difficult to live up to when they are sent behind German lines.
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A POW camp in the Soviet Union. Four young Germans exchange their uniforms to fight alongside the former enemy for a quicker end to the war. In Soviet uniform they drive with their caregiver on the train to the front. The fellow traveler does not hide long that they are German. It is not easy for them to cope with the new identity. Read More »