Drawn from Natsume Soseki’s 1914 novel, Kon Ichikawa’s deeply affecting Kokoro—called The Heart in the U.S., but heart in an expansive sense, including ideas of mind, spirit, love, sexuality—opens (after credits) and closes on the face of Shizu. At the beginning she has just quarreled with her spouse of thirteen years, Nobuchi, whom she (wrongly) […]
Daily Archives: March 26, 2009
The entry below is included in my 100 Greatest English-Language Films List, which you will find in two parts on this site. When during a murder investigation in a U.S.-Mexican border town the “Anglo” police captain complains how tough his job is, a Mexican narcotics officer shoots back, “A policeman’s work is only easy in […]
Orson Welles, working in color for the first time, made The Immortal Story for French television. This rueful, exquisite erotic fable comes from a story by Isak Dinesen. In order to actualize an ancient legend and experience sex vicariously, a wealthy Macao merchant hires a teenaged boy to make love with his “wife,” whom the […]
A collection of Calcutta stories spanning nearly forty years, this Bengali film by Mrinal Sen is tedious, schematic and disappointing. Only the first segment, based on Manik Bandyopadhyay’s story “The Right to Suicide,” achieves any sort of distinction. Indeed, the second segment, about the impact of the 1943 famine, seems especially lame, and diffuse, when […]
Dennis Grunes 