Word: ennui
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lawyers and the judge. Now, in the proceeding's final days, attention inevitably shifts to the silent decision makers, the twelve citizens who will be asked to say "guilty" or "not guilty." A favorite courtroom game is trying to read their faces for comprehension, fleeting signs of response, ennui or interest. Another is to guess how their backgrounds might affect their judgment...
Phlegmatic Dumbos. Amanda and Elyot (John Standing) are two fiendishly theatrical people who wear their ennui with ill-concealed hysteria. Having suffered the raptures and torments of marriage to each other, they put their hearts in a deep freeze. Divorced for several years, they are each on second honeymoons, having married two dolts from dullsville. All Coward plays are divided between two sets of people-bright, neurotic sophisticates and starchy, phlegmatic dumbos. Amanda and Elyot and their spouses meet on the adjoining verandas of a French Riviera hotel, and in no time at all Amanda and Elyot are making...
Barthelme turns a parodist's ear to several deserving sources of modern noise. A mock scenario for a film in the manner of Antonioni blurs the line between significant ennui and utter vacuity: "Shot of nail kegs at construction site. Camera peers into keg, counts nails." A news story of four Bunnies, fired from the New York Playboy Club for losing their "Bunny image," provokes a case history: "Bitsy S., an attractive white female of 28, was admitted to Bellevue Hospital complaining that she could not find, physically locate, her own body...
Frustration was the order of the day, in the back seat of the car as in the front rows of the Senate. Paddy Chayefsky came closest to the true life-style in Marty, when he portrayed the endless ennui of Saturday night: "So whadda ya figure on doin', Angie?" Small wonder that the '50s were the predecessor of protest, pornography, youthquakes, violence, acid rock and political upheaval...
...Whore can be seen as a very reactionary film that condemns contraception, abortion, and the dissolution of traditional values in general. Director Jean Eustache may intend to drag us through a murky decadence that has lost touch with even a sense of style until all it has left is ennui, automatic sex and hyper-self-consciousness. According to this view, the burden of the film is carried by the long, emotional monologue of a woman named Veronika (Francois Lebrun) who tells us that "the only time sex isn't sordid is when two people want to have a child...