Word: absurdities
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Jules and Jim could work as well as it did because Truffaut was still given to a young man's scepticism. And Jeanne Moreau at the center of the film held it together through a flamboyance and taste for the absurd that kept the love story where love stories belong between the lines. The comic suicide that ends Jules and Jim--Moreau's Katherine driving off an unfinished bridge--is the sort of outrageous gesture that Truffaut cannot even begin to approach in Two English Girls. Simplicity has turned to simple mindedness and tenderness to tripe...
...Lost Ones is not a story in any traditional sense, but the analytic creation of a paradigm for the base of our entire existence. However battered and strained the term is, the end of this relentless analysis is unavoidably the absurd. Even when the notion has been maintained to its fullest, a final explanation continues to elude it, and instead in its very absence mocks the exactness with which the analysis has been conducted...
...work succeeds in isolating and containing the absurd, in all its tedium and inexplicability, if only in a sort of dadaist image, a kind of giant coffee can with strobe light. The boredom is less involving than in Godot, the texture of the prose less rich than in the novels, but by maintaining its peculiar notion. The Lost Ones creates a super-metaphor with a life of its own. Beckett's latest book looks at the world with intent, unshrinking understanding--and touches its expression with an uncertain gleam of the playful...
...substance. He makes Gaudier-Brzeska's tragic sex life into a raucous wrestling match, and uses dazzling film effects as if they came off a camera's vanity table. As he wallows in style he turns what should be a tribute into an exercise in his taste for the absurd. This is simply anti-erotic and all too conventional...
...suspects that Heat had no choice but to rely on absurd and repulsive caricature, and the cheap humor that goes with it; if a film is unable or unwilling to achieve a true understanding of its characters, there is little else with which to gain hold of an audience. As the Motel Lady offers in defense of her preoccupation with pornographic comic books: "If you can't get it all the time, you make...