Word: charm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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GAMAL ABDEL NASSER was no stranger to TIME's correspondents, nor were they strangers to him. Indeed, such was the Egyptian leader's charm that few journalists found their dealings with him impersonal, and in the 18 years he was in power he formed relationships with a number of TIME staffers...
...close-ups in the film; most of the shots, in fact, are full-length portraits: Itard standing in his frock coat at his writing desk, his housekeeper pouring milk into a white china bowl, the boy drinking water at a window. The visual effect is to capture the period charm of engravings. By discovering conventions and exploiting them, Truffaut is inviting us to share in an artistic is trust with him. That he succeeds with an audience which usually prefers confession to narration is a measure of his talent...
That story, though, is excruciatingly boring. Godard never said he was interested in entertaining; now, it appears, he disdains even deception. When his early movies dealt with film, even tangentially, they did so with provocative wit and a serene, pungent charm. Vent de L'est, however, says at its audience, Your bourgeois concern for my movie is as contemptible as my regard for medium. "Realism," Godard once said, "is never exactly the truth, and the realism of cinema is obligatorily faked." In Vent de L'est, even the lies are faked, and the incessant, didactic narrators are finally...
Because Le Boucher is primarily a narrative, because it moves from scene to scene discretely, with visible growths and amplifications, its realism conveys an almost anthropological charm. The story makes an explicit link between the drives and aspirations of the Cro-Magnon man and the diverted energies of us, his descendants. Sublimation, murder, and love are three traditionally heavy themes, and the fact that Chabrol sets them in a narrative (rather than historical, or surrealistic, or impressionistic) context allows them to assume the same weight that, say, Freudian psychopathology plays in Alice in Wonder-land...
...kind of behavior which Harvard has always wanted to teach-or rather has hoped that it might in some degree exemplify in its teachers and teachings, and so strongly represent that those coming here to learn would inevitably find it for themselves-and finding it, be beguiled by its charm and sign on for life in allegiance...