Word: charm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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There is an ingenuous charm at work here, the quality of a daydream. All the characters are creatures of the best reveries of childhood. This does not mean that they should be taken lightly. Writer-Director Milius has some distance on his dreams, but he is still absolutely devoted to them. The Wind and the Lion has a view of the glories of combat and courage that is both willful and wistful. All enemies are united in a common bond of honor. Blood shed is never ignoble, always ennobling, and adversaries fight with grace and mutual respect. The movie even...
Lulu has a blustery intensity that finds its source largely in the superb performance of Gian Maria Volonte. He plays the conscientious and eventually disconcerted Lulu with just the right mixture of dumb charm and derangement. It is Petri's thesis that the industrial state can be located somewhere between depersonalization and psychosis, and Volonte is eminently capable of covering the range in between. His Lulu is a creature of blind dedication with the best production record in the factory. No matter that he comes home too bushed to enjoy the amorous invitations of his mistress (the wonderful Mariangela...
What made the "discreet charm" of Czech films of the 1960s in the West was a certain atmosphere, their simplicity in the observation of everyday life, of ordinary people, a subtle sense of humor combined sometimes with social satire. This required a deep and almost subconscious knowledge of a place and people and feelings. These qualities are impossible to transport to a new reality. In other words, it is impossible to make "Czech" movies in America. Ivan Passer's recent Law and Disorder just doesn't work when it tries to be a "Czech film" about ordinary Brooklyn shopkeepers...
...sanitorium itself is a welfare state Magic Mountain, set in Alpine grandeur that enables De Sica to display the saccharine cinematography that made his Garden of the Finzi Contins such a visually attractive but intellectually vapid film Snow capped mountains, exquisitely dressed women, luxurious but tasteful architecture and rustic charm proclaim heavyhandedly that we have entered another world totally alien to Clara's seedy three room tenement and grimy factory. Here Clara has everything she has been denied all her life, a room of her own, time to herself, wealthy girlfriends to lavish clothes on her and teach...
...film, is that this is precisely the sort of ambivalent and delusory self-consciousness we might expect a woman in her situation to have: the easiest exit from the drudgery and stark misery of factory and tenement is assimilation into the elite through physical beauty and seductive charm, as the heroines of mass culture from Cinderella to Marilyn Monroe have discovered. Had De Sica treated the contradictions in Clara's self-awareness with the sardonic tone whose subtle pinpricks enabled Flaubert to deflate Madame Bovary's romantic illusions. A Brief Vacation might have been a penetrating analysis of the obstacles...