Word: bittersweet
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...director, Noël the short-story writer, Noël the memoirist and, at the end, Sir Noël, knight of the British Empire. Yet of all his roles, Coward is likely to be remembered best as the songwriter with a taste for the bittersweet. Like Porter, he shied from passionate expression, sometimes in the belief that love, like moonlight, was "cruelly deceptive"; sometimes because he saw himself as an English Pierrot, the clown whose laughter cannot quite disguise the catch in his throat. Of the nearly 300 songs in Coward's collection, the dead-on love...
...Passione. Sex and food figure in prominently with the play's comic themes, as they did in Innaurato's highly successful Broadway production Gemini. But where the tasty humor and the social statement complemented each other will in Gemini in passione they form a somewhat less savory mixture. The bittersweet flavor Innaurato aims for is drowned in cloying source of sugary high-energy fun and the salty tears of a misplaced tugging at the emotional heartstrings...
...films one has come to expect delicacy, grace, comradely tenderness, a ruminative intelligence. Their directors seem to inhabit an exalted sorority where girlish high spirits, sage whispers and rueful endearments reverberate in the hallways. So leave it to French Film Maker Diane Kurys to devise, in Entre Nous, a bittersweet domestic epic that reconciles feminism with femininity...
Verdi: Falstaff (Deutsche Grammophon). Renato Bruson is an autumnal Sir John in Carlo Maria Giulini's bittersweet live recording...
...whose husband abandoned her 15 years earlier, plots to find a "gentleman caller" who will support her and marry her shy, lame daughter Laura. In the second half, a young man does call-no gentleman, rather an awkward go-getter whose own glory days are long past-and a bittersweet romance flutters through and out of Laura's life. Amanda, Laura and Tom (Laura's brother and the play's narrator) may be fated to melancholy, but they survive on a diet of waspish barbs and mock-courtly wit. This requiem for decayed ideals is also...