Word: eugenia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...DIED. Eugenia Sheppard, 851sh, society and fashion columnist for more than 40 years, whose breezy style, almost prescient eye for trends and emphasis on the people who create and wear clothes revolutionized fashion reporting in the 1950s and '60s, when her column in the New York Herald Tribune and some 80 other papers made her a power in the design business; of cancer; in New York City...
...cast--and dialogue--are international enough to put Cafe Pamplona to shame. Oleg Yankovsky plays a Russian poet named Gortchakov, who is in Italy to write a book about a 17th-century composer, Gortchakov is accompanied by an interpreter, Eugenia (Domiziana Giordano). Like Fellini, another comsummate stylist, Tarkovsky seems to have chosen his cast primarily for their visual qualities--particularly Giordano, who has the Surrealist-Madonna looks to complement the Surrealist-pastoral scenery forming the backbone of this film...
Gortchakov and Eugenia travel around the southern Italian countryside, presumably to research the biography the poet is writing. Throughout, there is an erotic tension between the two. Nothing, however, happens--everything remains at the stage where emotions are present as suggestions and undertones, never as catalysts to action...
EVEN THE OBVIOUSLY REAL scenes take on a dream-like quality. At the beginning, Eugenia visits a small chapel, a shrine to the Madonna of Childbirth. The chapel is half-dark, with ancient rows of pillars lit by hundreds of fluttering candles. All about, black clad women are performing the rituals of worship. Eugenia finds that she cannot bring herself to kneel, and asks the sacristan why only women are worshipping. He tells her that child-bearing and the church are their business; she says nothing in reply. All of a sudden, the air is full of small birds that...
...another scene, Gortchakov and Eugenia visit a man who had been mad ever since losing his wife. The madman, who lives in a dilapidated house full of pails and bottles to collect the rain falling through the roof--there is not a single sunny scene in the film--urges Gortchakov to perform a ritual, carrying a lit candle across one of the fountains outside his house--a wish that is later carried out. We know neither the reason for Gortchakov's visit nor the significance of the ritual...