Plot: A hieratic Count sits in his elegant mansion finishing his writings – Alphonse, a young Waloon officer, rides through the Murgia to reach his regiment in Naples but soon finds himself mysteriously detained at a inn in the strange and varied company of thieves, brigands, cabalists, noblemen, coquettes and gypsies, whose stories he records over ten days. A range of situations in stories-within-stories, which, like the Decameron and Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, provide entertainment on an epic scale. The two men’s destiny intertwined, it is difficult to know who’s real between the two and who belongs to the other’s mind. This is a journey for both of them which Alphonse will continue, uncertain in the end, if his experiences were real or a dream.

DVD label: CG Entertainment
DVD9
DVD Format: PAL
DVD Audio: AC3 5.1
Program(s): AnyDVD
Menus: Untouched
Video: Untouched
Audio: Untouched
DVD extras: Untouched
Extras contain: Trailer, Backstage
DVD runtime(s) (main feature and extras): 02:06:00

https://nitro.download/view/D8F43E53A3CE949/Agadah.2017.DVD9.PAL.rar

Language(s):Italian
Subtitles:Italian

The post Alberto Rondalli – Agadah (2017) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Even though Pedro Almodóvar was a major creative force in blowing away the severity of the Franco years, his films – like “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” – still caused shock-horror in the Spanish heartland. “Second Skin”, though by another director (Gerardo Vera), will almost certainly do likewise. Like Almodóvar, Gerardo Vera kicks aside the Catholic certainties of conservative Spain as he delineates the instability of a marriage, specifically caused by a husband who is torn between his wife and another man.

However, in a more general sense Vera seems to be pointing to what happens when a couple follows two different agendas, of which a gay relationship is only an extreme example. This is a film where the characters embrace desire, anxiety, insecurity, confusion and, finally, a small sign of hope, with the latter not couched in some cute ending.

Elena (Ariadna Gil) and Alberto (Jordi Molla) seem to be in a nice contented groove (she even seems happy when discussing their daily routine), and they have a pleasant flat and a kindly kid to prove it. She discovers hotel receipts in his suit, then declarations of love on his voicemail, and so family life begins to shake.

All three leads move convincingly from confidence through emotional agony to grappling with new lives, even though Elena is much too understanding on hearing the bad news. Still, the basic situation is nothing if not authentic, even if the screenplay moves forward in ordinary, obvious ways. It does, for example, highlight the symbolism of the colour red. The trick, of course, is to be able to include surprise within the bounds of credibility. Nonetheless, the low-key direction is pleasingly emphatic in this properly intense, claustrophobic tale of obsessive love.

1.96GB | 1h 40mn | 1015×432 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/E46466EA424CEDB/Gerardo_Vera_-_(1999)_Second_Skin.mkv

Language(s):Spanish
Subtitles:English

The post Gerardo Vera – Segunda piel AKA Second Skin (1999) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
In the third film of the Tulse Luper Suitcases, Luper, writer, collector and archivist, continues his adventures as a professional prisoner during the later years of the Second World War and its aftermath, the Cold War. Luper is shipwrecked on the Paradise Island of Sark and spends three months in self-imposed imprisonment on an idyllic beach until betrayed to the Germans by the Contumelys, a trio of jealous sisters. Pursued by a bounty-hunting jailer, Luper escapes to Barcelona to support and protect the lesbian marriage between the widow Mathilda Figura, of one murdered jailer, and Madame Plens, the mistress of another.

Luper becomes a prisoner in Turin, in a travelling elevator, a coerced liftboy privy to the lives and secrets of Italian Fascist-beleaguered citizens, including Primo Levi, taking his clients to the top of the Mole Antonelliana, a symbol of freedom in the sky.

Luper is in Venice where he drowns his jailer Zeloty in a canal, and in Rome where he finally becomes the lover of his arch Mormon American jailer, Lephrenic, who is dying of uranium poisoning. Luper then escapes north to Budapest to assist two mortuary attendants, Boule and Daude, in their self-imposed task of dragging Jewish corpses from the Danube, where he meets Raoul Wallenberg, the saviour of jews from Hungarian fascists. And then in his sixteenth adventure in these three films, he is imprisoned on a checkpoint-post bridge on the East-West German border in 1963, blackmailed for his freedom by a ferocious chess-playing Russian Colonel Kotcheff and his wife Alazarin who demands stories that, Scherherazade-like, Luper supplies, before escaping, when he has completed a new collection of tales for The 1001 European Nights.

Paralleling his adventures, Luper’s reputation as a writer and as a collector, has never stopped growing, and the 92 suitcases associated with his life are finally presented in a grand exhibition that culminates in the official unpacking of his 92nd. The contents of this suitcase present evidence that reveal an elaborate hoax that implies that Luper may never have had the existence he is supposed to have had, but may have been killed in a childhood accident when he was ten years old, when the garden wall he climbed in the Newport children’s game, collapsed around him. His long life indeed could have been an elaborate fiction created in love and guilt by his childhood friend, Martino Knockavelli.

1.64GB | 2 h 3 min | 750×432 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/1CA0A32D741278A/Peter_Greenaway_-_(2004)_The_Tulse_Luper_Suitcases,_Part_3_From_Sark_to_the_Finish.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:None

The post Peter Greenaway – The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2004) first appeared on Cinema of the World.