Word: courtesanly
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...draped and cluttered rooms, the constraints of clothing, language, manners and social ritual were familiar givens, matters for exquisitely observed, morally neutral description. For Schlondorff they are a malevolent astonishment. If there is a rational explanation for the obsessive, socially destructive love Charles Swann (Jeremy Irons) feels for the courtesan Odette de Crecy (Ornella Muti), it is to be found in these oppressive surroundings, where the very air breathes of neurasthenic surrender and the will is strangled in brocade. If the screenplay by Peter Brook, Jean-Claude Carriere and Marie-Helene Estienne omits or hastily vulgarizes Proust's nuanced...
...German Director Volker Schlŏndorff (The Tin Drum), 44, agreed to "jump on the sinking vessel to try to save it." He focused on a single vignette from the book. English Actor Jeremy Irons, 35, and Italian Screen Siren Ornella Muti, 28, signed to play Swann and the courtesan he marries. The result, Un Amour de Swann (English version: Swann in Love), has opened in Paris, where it is a sensation, attracting intellectual controversy and long lines. Says Producer Stephane: "The miracle happened...
...condition." Painters and sculptors thrilled staid merchants with luscious nudes fig-leafed with titles like Venus Now Wakes. Manet's Olympia shocked the salon of 1865 not because she was naked but because she looked back at the viewer with the defiant eyes of a thoroughly contemporary Parisian courtesan. On second thought, said Freud, who is one of Gay's principal heroes, perhaps "a certain measure of cultural hypocrisy is indispensable for the maintenance of civilization...
...months' sleep, cast off his pale little slough like a molting snake, emerged gleaming, devilish, unrecognizable." The creature that resulted from this metamorphosis was soon to make himself at home in the bed of another of Colette's celebrated characters, Léa, the retired courtesan. Upon reading the final version of Chéri, André Gide wrote the author that he had devoured her short novel "in a single gulp." His verdict: "From beginning to end, not a weakness, not a redundancy, not a commonplace...
...novel sets itself up as a parable: "Sadistic women have a lot to teach the rest of us," the narration concludes at one point in all seriousness. The beautiful, wealthy and unfulfilled woman leaves her husband and the comforts of a Fifth Avenue apartment to become a "courtesan to truth," or more literally, to Lautner. Her predicament revolves around her inability to determine what constitutes duty--to an oppressive mother, an enfeebled father, a rigid and insecure mate--and to free herself of all unincurred obligation. Secondly, she aims to lead a moral life, to fight hungers of all sorts...