Word: baring
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is a vigorous, thoroughly entertaining revival of Clare Boothe Luce's saucy 1936 saga of bare-knuckled Eves. Interestingly enough, the play is something of a rarity in terms of the U.S. theater's comic tradition in recent decades. We have grown accustomed to kooky comedy, sight-and-gag comedy, situation comedy and even black comedy. But Mrs. Luce writes social comedy...
...unimaginative as that label. Since there are two separate images on the same screen, the ads promise, "Twice the tension! Twice the terror!" A little elementary multiplication furnishes the melancholy reminder that twice zero is still nothing. Two images only reinforce the suspicion that Writer-Director Richard L. Bare had difficulty filling even one screen, and had to resort to all sorts of scraps off the cutting-room floor. While a maladjusted youth (Randolph Roberts) scurries about a California seaside resort slicing up comely blonde lodgers, an organist (Maryesther Denver) appears on whichever side of the screen is unoccupied...
...bare, white stage occurs as the first and last image of the film, and in its recurrences drives the intensity of the film back on itself. Scenes repeated give a feeling of something of incredible difficulty being made. This impression extends to our glimpses of Sebastien and Claire's difficult relationship, where the real meanings and aggressions slip out under lines as prepared as those of the theater sequences. Tone becomes very important, and Rivette handles it very subtly, as he does almost all the elements at a director's disposal. Some tiny scenes almost lost in the film...
...entire movie is narrated with Nureyev and Fonteyn's words interspliced) by Briton Bryan Forbes, intoning as though he were touring Stonehenge, from a script with such penetrating insights as, "dancing is very difficult, you know", or "this is a dancer's dressing room; no frills, just four bare walls...
THERE IS a bare cohesiveness that sets Such a Gorgeous Kid Like Me apart from Truffaut's other films, in spite of similarities, stylistic and otherwise, that draw it close. It is a film of individual brilliance in sequences, scenes, and even in single frames, as well as the director's nearly traditional ease and genius of characterization. In 1959, Truffaut was going to be a genius. He isn't, and it's because he hasn't tried. He simply doesn't want to tax himself, and he'd prefer not to tax us either. He could make forgettable movies...