Word: brzeska
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...having emigrated to London, became a central figure in the avant-garde before being killed in World War I at the age of 24. Russell's theme is the long, violent and platonic love affair between Gaudier and a neurotic Polish writer almost twice his age, Sophie Brzeska, whose name he joined to his. Hampered by poverty, his life truncated at a moment when most artists are only beginning to work, Gaudier-Brzeska did not produce a large body of sculpture; but he was an indefatigable letter writer, and much of his correspondence survives. The letters -like the sculpture...
...dealers' windows, spouting off against Establishment art values from the top of an Easter Island head in the Louvre, and performing unlikely - and, in real life, unrecorded - feats of gymnastics like carving a marble torso several feet high in six hours flat to im press a dealer. Sophie Brzeska is played by Dorothy Tutin - an elegantly controlled and touching exercise in tight, fey dottiness...
Alas, the context in which Russell sets these performances is obtuse to the point of caricature. Did Gaudier-Brzeska have a mistress? Then she must be a pneumatic and witless art groupie (Helen Mirren), daughter of a landed cavalry officer, who does her obligatory nude scene on the staircase of an immense, frigid Adam country house; she must also be a suffragette, which gives Russell much opportunity for lumpen-sexist travesty by having her do a song-and-hop number about votes for women in a nightclub and then, at Gaudier's demand, drop her knickers onstage. Around...
...problem is that Russell's idea of a psychological study probes no deeper than surface sensuality. He is indifferent to the artist beneath. For his empathy with Gaudier-Brzeska is based on no more than the latter's rebellion against society's distrust of freely expressed emotion. It is finally a shallow empathy that perverts sympathy into sensationalism. He sees himself as the artist messiah, bridging the gulf between art and life with a film style incarnating creative energy. But his subject depends on its special social and artistic history for its form and interest, and Russell piles on period...
Russell films as if life were a field day for the senses, but senses robbed of the emotions that give them 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...