Word: ashram
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...most famous adulteress in American literature. Sarah Worth (nee Price) boasts a Prynne among her ancestors and, like Hester, a daughter named Pearl. This mother too is a fallen woman, running away from Massachusetts and her physician-husband of some 20 years to join a charismatic Indian guru's ashram in the Arizona desert. After her plane lands in Los Angeles, she relays a message home to her best friend Midge: "I stayed in this motel near the airport in a dreary area called Hawthorne...
...story of Sarah's pilgrimage unfolds through the missives she sends from the ashram: to her husband, daughter, mother, friend, psychiatrist, hairdresser and assorted others. With her nearest and dearest, Sarah fends off recriminations by going on the offense. She hectors her husband about his affairs with his nurses and the upkeep of their house and gardens. She tells Pearl, a Yale undergraduate who is spending a year abroad at Oxford, to avoid English homosexuals and "to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country." She accuses her widowed mother living...
...Ashram, 30 miles west of Los An-geles in Calabasas, offers no pampering frills at all. Bedrooms and bathrooms are shared by the ten guests, even celebrities like Barbra Streisand, Jane Fonda and Esther Williams (who ventured some hints on how to clean the pool). It's "purgatory," Owner Anne- Marie Bennstrom cheerfully confesses. Others would place it further below. "You can come to us anytime, even the middle of the night, if you feel like crying," Fitness Instructor Anniqa Foress says, to soothe newcomers. The twelve-year-old Ashram is notorious for hiking trails so steep and narrow that...
...handle on his domestic arrangements is a little more difficult. The Gladneys are a parody of relationships resulting from multiple divorce. Stepchildren, half brothers and half sisters drift in and out of the household. One former wife is abroad with the CIA; another runs the business end of an ashram under the name Mother Devi. Talk is plentiful, but communication is illusive. "There must be something in family life that generates factual error," muses Jack. "Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive...
...would indicate to us his humanity and instead we have to find that in his paltry frame. In fact, the closest the movie approaches to any substantive character development comes early on, when in South Africa Gandhi pushes his wife around for balking at cleaning the latrines in his ashram. Gandhi quickly apologizes and the scene fades. From that point onward, Gandhi appears to take never a false step or, for that matter, ever to be in the wrong...