Word: cassel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...years later, this new film, his 29th, uses a device reminiscent of The Exterminating Angel. A small group of frivolous, well-heeled Parisians (Fernando Rey, Delphine Seyrig, Stephane Audran, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Bulle Ogier, Paul Frankeur) sit down to a series of meals that are in some way either interrupted or totally disrupted. The movie is a skein of the guests' separate fantasies, each one originating with the recurring comic nightmare of a disastrous dinner. Bunuel, as if working an artful parlor trick, sometimes pulls one dream from inside another like a series of splendid silks...
MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ. A love story by John Cassavetes, poignant and sometimes hilarious, with stunning performances by Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel...
...text might have been taken from Eleanor Rigby: "All the lonely people, where do they all come from?/ All the lonely people, where do they all belong?" Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel) is a manic parking-lot attendant who tries to meet girls by the unconvincing and always unsuccessful expedient of claiming prior acquaintance. Consequently, he spends a lot of time alone at the movies...
Gena Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) brings a poignancy and complexity to Minnie that makes hers one of the memorable performances of the year. Cassel is full of dizzying charm and whirling-dervish energy. As always with Cassavetes' films, there are cameo roles so rich they could each make a movie in themselves: Val Avery as a loudmouthed date of Minnie's, Tim Carey as a poetry-spouting bum who disdains the movies ("A lot of lonely people sitting there looking up at a screen-what do I need that for?"). But almost stealing the show from these pros...
Rosenzweig started out as a Jew of his time. He was born in Cassel, Germany, to a comfortable, culturally assimilated family; only a great-uncle was a dedicated, religious Jew. Rosenzweig's real interests as a young man were intellectual: first medicine, then later, at the universities of Freiburg and Berlin, such studies as literature, classical languages, philosophy, history and political theory...