Word: francesca
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Lager too still aspired to make a positivist art about modern life based on classical principles. A whole range of artists, from Piero della Francesca to Manet, are implicit in his image in praise of skilled labor, The Constructors, 1950. Perhaps the show's most moving and nuanced postwar tribute to sculpture's classical past is Henri Laurens' Morning, 1944. A bronze woman awakening: it ought to be an idyllic image. But it is not, because the massive post-Cubist forms of her limbs suggest stress, a heavy, invisible load to which the energy locked in the figure responds...
...doomed before it started, for the book's readers had played the movie version in their heads, cast the roles, lived the love scenes. Also, today's films have a sophisticated language for the depiction of violence but become tongue-tied when the subject is serious eroticism. Told from Francesca's point of view, the book runs its words over Robert's body as if they were the fingers or lips of a new lover. He is hard, an animal, physical and spiritual. Her orgasms are liberating, exhausting visits to a land where he is king. ("Robert," she exclaims...
...Eastwood. He is the most reticent of directors -- where the book ogles, the film discreetly observes -- and, here, the courtliest of stars. The movie has a scene in which Francesca watches Robert wash himself. But Clint would never let the camera play over his body. Nor, as director, would he be anything but protective of Streep's corporal mortality. The two stars are past miming youth's sleek exertions. Why do it now? They didn't do it then...
...picture clocks in at 2 1/4 hours -- a span in which anyone who got past 10th grade could read the book, linger over favorite passages and smoke a reflective cigarette afterward. Part of this time is wasted on a framing story about the affair's impact decades later on Francesca's grown children. The rest is lavished on the warming of two stars and styles as they reach accommodation...
...Streep acts. He relaxes into a role; she wills herself into it, like a woman determined to make a dress two sizes too small look stunning on her. This time she tries on a southern Italian accent, with the weary, knowing lilt of an Anna Magnani. Soon she is Francesca -- or some rarefied version of her -- aching but not expecting to find someone who can tap her gift for love. Before she commits to the affair, you understand her tension, her indecision. In a medley of bold and subtle gestures, Streep tells Francesca's plaintive story. Through the actress...