Word: aristocratic
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...often leads to the sentimental conclusion that such an identification is possible--a denouement that marks such otherwise great films as Grand Illusion. But in Rules of the Game, Renoir rejects false resolutions. Though the film seems to identify itself sporadically with the aspirations of different characters--the eccentric aristocrat, his Viennese wife the romantic aviator, and Octave (played by Renoir himself)--the movie ultimately demonstrates all their limitations. Renoir blows the form of romantic comedy apart. In the process, he constructs a work of great subtlety and complexity, which in the starkness of its vision conveys the difficulties...
Stories about deHory's life make for a marvelous puzzle. The man affects the aristocrat, adopting the "de" before his pseudonym and wearing a monocle. Yet Irving traces his origins back to a Budapest ghetto, where deHory started life as Elemere Hoffman. Irving claims that Elmyr's fakes hang in prestigious museums all over Europe and America, but the so-called experts insist not. Others swear up and down that deHory signed the paintings he forged, making their sale illegal; the charming counterfeiter (no doubt at his lawyer's behest) denies the charge. The testimony conflicts like crazy...
...mentally illustrate how the form of a building conveys its meaning with my own experiences--what it signifies that Mather House is a fortress on the outskirts of Harvard's enclave, that Leverett House closely resembles a Holiday Inn, or that the Fogg imitates the palazzo of a Renaissance aristocrat. I was not daydreaming distractedly. The National Trust purposely relates their statements to individuals' experience by including exercises in architectural awareness (my favorite: "Find a building that repels you and ask yourself why."). An outline of styles in American architectural history and photographs of aspects of the built environment (from...
Francine du Plessix Gray, 46, is a tall, blonde woman with large eyes and elegant cheekbones. The daughter of a French aristocrat and a White Russian emigré, she lived in Paris as a child, moved to the U.S. in 1941, went to a fashionable New York girls' school (Spence) and Barnard. After college she had a fling in Paris, then returned home and settled down to life in the country with her painter husband and two sons, now 15 and 16. A sporadically lapsed Catholic, Mrs. Gray demonstrated against the war in Viet Nam, was busted, got involved...
...does not know whodunit and one does not care either. The movie, steadfastly hare brained, has an unreasonably attractive cast: Jacqueline Bisset, elegant and wry as a bored member of Turin high society; Jean-Louis Trintignant, absorbed and enigmatic all the way through the part of a bisexual aristocrat. Mastroianni continues to be as relaxed as a sleep walker, as unruffled as a cat on the prowl. His shrugs are funnier than the dialogue he is given, and he employs them defensively, to good effect...