Word: genet
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Independent Whim. Ulm's particular specialty has been the theater of the absurd, and absurdity-:the existentialist-born notion that only the moment matters and the moment is meaningless -reaches great heights in Ulm, so great in fact that writers like Beckett, Jean Genet (The Blacks) and Eugene lonesco (The Bald Soprano) are actually regarded as "old fuddy-duddies" by some residents. Beckett's new Play, in their view, has a plot and is therefore blighted...
...Genet's Balcony is now a movie. Aficianadoes of the author will be horrified at the amount of revision Ben Maddow applied to the play; others, like the good old Boston moralists among them, may just be horrified. The great majority of viewers, however, will probably be simply bored...
...credit, the film possesses many virtues that the stage Balcony lacked. There is a consistent if somewhat incoherent plot line, and good riot scenes expertly spliced from newsreels dispell, to a degree, the static quality that results from Genet's weak talkiness. The playwright treated his characters as speaking symbols; Maddow converted them into more three-dimensional figures...
...product is essentially dull. Genet's conception of the entire world as a brothel may have shocked Broadway critics four years ago. But the idea seems pretty tame now. When Shelley Winters explains this Weltanschauung in the movie's fade, for the benefit of the slow-witted, she adds a powerful insult to a rather mild injury. As for sensuous aspects, devotees of this limited segment of cinema art had better stick to Washington Street. There is nothing in The Balcony that could overly disturb a Puritan Sunday picnic...
...Balcony. Jean Genet's allegory of life as a bawdy house where men buy illusions at the price of their masculinity. Shelley Winters is the madam who knows what her customers want...