Word: cukor
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...Cukor fabricates stock character types and conventional plot complications with playful expertise. Henry, the stodgy middle-class bourgeois, Augusta, the eccentric aunt, Visconti, her wildly romantic macho first love, and her present lover, Wordsworth, a fortune-telling black African, wind up on a mock spy adventure on the Orient Express as Augusta delivers an illegal $100,000 ransom to Visconti held captive in Africa. Fortified by the belief that love conquers all. Aunt Augusta cajoles, lies, steals, blackmails, and is deported in the course of her mission. Having sacrificed practically all she own when she finally does deliver the ransom...
...CUKOR FILMS THE HEYDAY she remembers as an advertisement for the gay life. She lived on champagne in Grant Hotels with vast baroque rooms, and parlors caressed by generations of gamblers. Life was a spirited courtship of romance itself, all style and peacockery, quick passion and gondolas...
...quite an ode to romanticism, Travels With My Aunt is more an elegy to its passing. The romantic Cukor has turned capricious skeptic, and sentiment becomes a gambol. The loops of his freewheeling narrative dip eagerly into the past and circle back a bit crestfallen. And in between, cherished romance turns sappy to the taste and drippy to the nth degree. Cukor has dished out sentiment in order to bid it fond farewell...
...Cukor is proselytizing for the style of the good old days but he knows full well its illusions. He only half-heartedly retreats into a past he cannot believe in. As his camera traipses gaily through the scenes of Aunt Augusta's youth, lighting it in rich rose colors and tuning it to a soundtrack of syrupy violins, he risks distending what should be entertainment into statement...
...Cukor is caught between, unsure of which way to turn, so her compromises and gives a consciously corny edge to his romanticism. His irony saves his nostalgia from sickening. He pleads sympathy for bankrupt dreams on the condition that those dreams are not indulged. Travels With My Aunt is simply a sketchbook movie of daydreams gone aglimmering...