Word: flashbacks
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THIS IRONIC contradiction between supposed free will but actual determinism continues throughout. The first flashback's subject--the end of Lola's affair with Frantz Lizst--couls show her perfectly free (it's constantly filled, for example, with romantic music), and therefore like the heroes of Ophuls' early films. But Ophuls' static one-shots emphasize the separateness of the two lovers. Large objects in these shots' foregrounds express their estrangement. The characters' harmonious existence depends now entirely on their restraint, their good taste (Lizst, for example, being a musician). There is no exuberant, graceful triumph over surroundings; the first time...
...return to the circus takes Lola backstage to her dressing room, a cage behind which pass actors staging her childhood. The camera follows them back and forth, passing in the middle of each are the sick, static Lola, and provoking a second flashback. In it Lola, a child still mourning her father's death, accompanies her mother aboard ship only to discover her affair with an officer. The sweeping camera movements which follow this child through the ship and express her curiosity and longing, ironically stress the objects and walls that confine her movement through the cramped lower deck...
...scenes between Julie (Jeanne Moreau) and the artist (Charles Denner) blend exposition and characterization as cinematically as anything this side of Chabrol. Also Truffaut's obsession with Hitchcock has finally left the realm of shot-copying, resulting in some interesting notions about audience identification, point-of-view cutting, and flashback structure...
...Days of Marriage," and in it Mrs. Sato described the Premier as about as fierce an old-style Japanese husband as can be imagined-a rake, a wife-beater and a man so taciturn that he never consulted his wife on anything. It was not only an uncommonly candid flashback of the Satos' early wedded life but a commentary on the old code and how it has been broken. And the source was the woman whose husband heads one of the most industrialized and progressive nations in the world...
...speaking of the son: "He called me old man!") to the absurd ("I don't know where you're headed, but you're going to be pushed there damn fast."). Some of the worst writing centers around Paul's teenage affair, gratuitously stuck into the second half--complete with flashback...