“The past is never dead. It hasn’t even passed yet.” The above lines, which appear as text in Jean-Luc Godard’s soulful “self-portrait,” JLG/JLG—autoportrait de décembre, approximate lines from William Faulkner’s play Requiem for a Nun. Godard’s elegiac mood marks, not bridges, discrepancies between himself and the rest of creation. Correlative to these are spiritual gaps […]
Daily Archives: November 13, 2008
David Mackenzie, the director of Young Adam (2003), has made another estimable, moody, unsettling film. Hallam Foe—pointlessly retitled Mr. Foe in the U.S.—revolves around a teenager with problems. He is fixated on his mother, whose drowning death has traumatized him, he suspects his stepmother as having had a gold-digging hand in her death, and he […]
Salvatore Lojacono, a clownish barber, missed the Second World War and much else, having spent 22 years in prison for murdering someone whom he believed dishonored his marriage. Released for good behavior, he suddenly finds himself without the security that prison afforded—lodgings and food provided by the state—and must additionally cope with a “free,” unfamiliar […]
Dennis Grunes 