Word: denouement
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...problem with most tales of nightshade and magnolia, of course, is the denouement; The Beguiled simply winds down. Siegel and his scriptwriters have contrived a conclusion that is brutal but predictable. Although they paint themselves into a corner and don't quite escape gracefully, it is at least a lot of spooky fun watching them get there...
...This denouement is glib and unsatisfactory, intimating that the source of all Marcello's problems is a long-suppressed homosexuality. Bertolucci has said that the parading band of Communists who jostle Marcello in the last scene are intended to suggest "the wave of the future." But that symbol, juxtaposed with the homosexuality episode, creates confusion where there should be revelation, and will leave audiences more or less where it leaves Marcello: nowhere. There is some other rather lumpish and facile symbolism throughout the film that Bertolucci's virtuosity can only partially disguise...
...things are profoundly wrong. Warfare is widely seen as inglorious. There is a growing public, if not yet legal tolerance for marijuana. Still, like England's 19th century Chartists, the radicals are seeing the larger society adopt and subsume much of their revolution. "Cooptation" is an infuriating and unsatisfactory denouement for the revolutionary. The Chief of Naval Operations grows sideburns: the war goes on. Yet drastically changed public attitudes prove that not all of the co-optation has been merely decorative...
...comprehension of his own nature-which is not saintly. Nor is it his nature, as he once thought, to play "Fifth Business"-a special catalyst's role, as the author explains, not hero or heroine, confidant or villain, but "nonetheless essential to bring about the recognition or the denouement, in drama and opera companies organized according to the old style." Ramsay, the eccentric schoolmaster, has played this role in the lives of friends. In the end, completing his solitary voyage, he assumes his proper role as hero...
...Sherlock Holmes. A film from Billy Wilder that is less severe than one might expect and less funny than one might hope. But there are many fine moments, a nice performance by Genevieve Page, and a kind of bad-boy-goes-straight kindness in Wilder's surprisingly gentle denouement...