Keld, though kind, is dull. Rie, his wife, has had enough. When she announces she is leaving and divorcing him, Keld musters what protest he can: “Couldn’t we buy new furniture instead?” Guess not; Rie is out in an instant, right after telling Keld that he must admit to adultery, although she knows he has […]
Monthly Archives: July 2010
Enmeshing in a postmodernist form shards of the earliest Sanskrit epic poem, Valmiki’s The Ramayana, whose story takes place, now, some 7,000 years ago, Sita Sings the Blues is a complicated film that nevertheless feigns an air of the primitive. In truth, it bombards the viewer with aural and visual overloads that keep it busy-busy. […]
Gillian Armstrong’s beautiful High Tide, from Australia, begins with a bravura shot: a tracking camera seems to be showing fleeting landscape, perhaps through a car window, in the deep of night. We are pulled up short when the camera stops suddenly; backed up by three blonde-wigged backup singers, an Elvis impersonator is performing on stage. […]
Young Mel Gibson is brilliant (best actor, Australian Film Institute)—clean, deft, quick, poignant—as sprinter Frank Dunne in Peter Weir’s antiwar historical fable, Gallipoli, an antidote now for any bad feelings that his public comments and private actions may have engendered some three decades hence. In the intervening time, Gibson has been one of the few […]
“Home” is one’s defense against the outside world. But what is the upshot when “home,” including spouse and children, becomes one’s whole world? Michel (Oliver Gourmet, giving the best performance) and Marthe (Isabelle Huppert, fluent and fragile, if less complicated than usual—best actress, Mar del Plata) are long settled into their happy marriage, “apart from […]
Dennis Grunes 