Hua hun is a charming, poignant film about twentieth-century Chinese painter and sculptor Pan Yuliang, framed as the elderly Yuliang’s reminiscence, but then hauntingly extended to include her death in Paris in 1977. Her family sold the orphaned fifteen-year-old to a brothel, but she gains her release through marriage to Pan Zanhua. They have both […]
Daily Archives: July 22, 2008
I have added this entry to my list of the 100 Greatest Films, which you will find elsewhere on this blog. One of the most moving films ever made, Supplement is writer-director Krzysztof Zanussi’s deepening of Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease (2000). Recycling the three most important characters, it covers the same period, […]
Danila Bogrov at least claims to have fulfilled his military obligation in a clerical position. No sooner is he out of the service than he wanders onto the outdoor set of a musical video that’s being shot and he is beaten up and detained briefly by police. His mother predicts that he will end up […]
Mostly taken up by conversation between two characters, a father and his grown son, Ettore Scola’s Che ora è? is commendable most of all for its refusal to sink into the usual claptrap, soap operatic melodrama. (Think I Never Sang for My Father, Gilbert Cates, 1970.) Usually these films are full of contrivance, a part […]
