Word: cenci
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...National Symphony Orchestra went through a program of Beethoven, Mozart, Stravinsky and William Schuman that filled the center's concert hall with rich, vibrant and joyously reverberant highs, lows and middles. The opera house's acoustical turn came on Friday, with the premiere of Beatrix Cenci by Argentinian Master Alberto Ginastera. It was produced by the Opera Society of Washington. Brutal and bloody, the work runs a full gamut of orchestral and vocal sound. It proved beyond doubt that the opera house is one of the best-sounding auditoriums...
Last time out, Mia Farrow had Rosemary's Baby. In Secret Ceremony, she is Rosemary's baby, a diminutive monstrosity named Cenci whose wide, cornflower eyes open onto a hostile, deranged mind...
...worth. For now, she is trapped in a glossy, twittering movie that poses as a psychological horror story. Leonora, an over-the-hill prostitute (Elizabeth Taylor), is accosted by Cencion a London bus. The girl invites her home-where Leonora discovers an eerily familiar face in a photograph. Cenci's dead mum was a ringer for the prostitute. And, vice versa, Cenci reminds the prostitute of her daughter, dead lo these seven years. The two settle down symbiotically in Cenci's gloomy, Edwardian mansion. Along comes Cenci's randy stepfather...
Jealously guarding her "daughter," the prostitute begins a battle with Albert for possession of the child. But Cenci is possessed already-by demonic fantasies. Playing the two adults off against each other, she speaks to a nonexistent lover, fakes a rape scene and pretends to be pregnant by stuffing security toys under her dress. In such a warped triangle, nothing can go straight, and after a lot of lallygagging around the mansion and a seaside resort, Director Joseph Losey provides the anemic story with an inappropriately gory ending...
...father but with a calculating streak that makes her something less than lovable. Her affair with Olimpio is described not as a great love but as a product of tawdry circumstance that came in handy when she decided on murder. Most historical novelists would wallow in the Cenci story. Prokosch moves around it with the kind of detachment that makes it as believable as it is readable...