Word: ennui
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...20th century. Mountstuart starts his diary as a senior in high school--a sixth former, as they say--and goes on to chronicle his years at Oxford, his early literary efforts and his assorted marriages and affairs. Sophisticated and self-deprecating, flip-flopping between passionate love and fashionable ennui, Mountstuart makes for good company. A pleasure-seeker, he travels ceaselessly, eats and drinks abundantly and lies fluently. Boyd insinuates his hero as an extra into several historical panoramas--the General Strike of 1926, the Spanish Civil War--and has some cheeky fun with celebrity cameos: Picasso appears as a manic...
...after a failed marriage to model-actress Julianne Phillips, Springsteen moved into a $14 million mansion in Beverly Hills, Calif. (the faithful jeered), wed Scialfa in 1991 (the faithful cheered) and sang about relationships, kids and his ennui (the faithful shrugged). Then in '95 he put out an album of folk songs, The Ghost of Tom Joad. It won a Grammy for best contemporary folk album, but it felt more like a Woody Guthrie tribute than a Springsteen record. The songs were stark and compelling, but the old optimism was gone. The characters of Tom Joad lived on the fringes...
...gritty Gold Rush, Akutagawa prizewinner Miri Yu uncovers the psychic machinery linking wealth and violence, ennui and petty crime, boredom and murder in a tale of a teen who commits patricide, hiding the corpse in a basement vault filled with gold. In Yu's Japan, the kids are definitely not all right?but society is far too screwed up to notice...
...paired with vulnerability. In the role that made him famous across China, as a fresh-off-the-boat newlywed in the 1993 TV series A Beijing Man in New York, Jiang played an out-of-work cellist who battles bitchy bosses, sticky-fingered factory managers and an immigrant's ennui. In Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum, he makes passionate love to Gong Li in a breezy patch of matted sorghum stalks, then gets drunk and boisterously brags about it. When Gong Li slams a door on him, Jiang's face transforms from posturing conquistador to ashamed fool. "He looks tough...
...Unknown Pleasures has this same edgy ennui in its tale of four young people; this being China, the driving is all on motorbikes. A more traditional mainland film, Dai Sajie's Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, brings literature to the rural masses but not much pop to the party. Outside the competition, Taiwan pursued its two-cinemas-one-country course. On the art side: Yee Chih-yen's Blue Gate Crossing, a teen courtship fable with a lovely, troubled mood. On the pop side: Chen Kuo-fu's Double Vision, an enjoyable, disposable serial-killer thriller with stars from...