Word: cousin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...great-great-grandfather, a funeral mason from Aberdeen in Scotland, helped carve the Albert Memorial in London before settling in Philadelphia in 1868. But Alexander Calder, looking at 78 like a rumpled dugong in a red flannel shirt, belongs to a hallowed American type: the bike-shop genius, cousin to Henry Ford or Wilbur Wright. Except for the big commissions of the past 20 years, his sculpture is still mostly improvisation-tin-snips and pliers stuff, made in his studios in Connecticut and the south of France...
...Giants aren't even the New York Giants anymore, even though they really are (something of a travesty, something of a shame), and they really just don't have it in them to win anyway. It was an event, a big event, like the wedding of a distant cousin, and you had to be there...
Despite the buoyancy Tacchella successfully distills from the group scenes, Cousin, Cousine doesn't live up to its billing as a winsome masterpiece, largely because the amorous cousins, played by Marie Christine Barrault and Victor Lanoux, are au fond too shallow. While no one would demand a trenchant political or psychological comment from romantic comedy, we do expect two distinct and compelling personalities whose collision will charm or amuse us. Maybe I'm prejudiced by American films (especially the screwball variety), but I want more quirkiness and spunk from the leads. Although Barrault and Lanoux are frequently endearing...
...lured into raising these issues, seemingly irrelevant to a light romantic comedy, because Cousin, Cousine contains enough dramatic power and directorial sophistication to go, if only occasionally, beyond the limits of the genre. At times Tacchella's characters beg to be taken seriously, but in the end he always seems to be more comfortable with group scenes and visual humor. No one in Cousin, Cousine is witty--Tacchella wouldn't allow a character that freedom. He prefers to draw back and let us laugh at people and situations--a man with his pants down at a formal dinner, a woman...
...Cousin, Cousine's final image epitomizes Tacchella's approach. Abandoned by the magician and his audience, a woman who is supposed to have been sawn in half cries out to be released from half a trunk. If Tacchella wants us to be truly involved with his films, he will have to let his people...