Word: gielguds
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...individual mind and the artist's efforts to exorcise them through his work, Resnais, for all his technical aplomb, cannot fully transcend the privacy of the nightmare. The effect of his camera work and wordplay is dazzling, but the tension they create is somehow sterile. The agony of Gielgud's musings is intelligible, in the end, only...
...Resnais's chief devices is the manipulation of point of view. Throughout the first segment, Gielgud's voice directs the jockeying between characters, writing and rewriting the scenes they act. Of all his subjects, Langham's daughter-in-law Sonia (Ellen Burstyn) is most completely a literary creation; deprived of a will of her own, she compounds her self-image from other people's imaginings. Her husband--"a sanctimonious sod," his father calls him--is a model of self-control, afraid of violence "because it reeks of spontaneity," of himself because his own urges to violence must be so vigorously...
ALREADY two different levels of reality appear at work--the "normal" interaction of these characters and Gielgud's obvious interpolations, his artistic mistakes. Gielgud is perfect here, capturing the petulance of the artist whose creative instincts have gone awry. In one scene, Burstyn unintentionally speaks in Gielgud's voice. In another, Warner's brother, a noted footballer, jogs through a bedroom, where Stritch and Bogarde are conversing, on his way to the bathroom. The funniest of these sequences occurs between Burstyn and Warner. As they sit on a park bench together, Warner exclaims with surprise, "I've got an erection...
...between ominous images--of bands of refugees waiting to be dragged away, of a body being disemboweled, of a hand turning over a rock to reveal worms crawling underneath, the filter is removed, and reality--conscious reality--glints forth in images of pastoral purity. We are back in Providence, Gielgud's luxurious estate, framed by equally lush verdure and a glittering lake, and the context of the preceding segments is gradually clarified...
...Gielgud is now less an author than a very tired old man in the last throes of illness, waiting for his family to reunite for an outdoor dinner in this picture-postcard setting. When they arrive, they are hardly what we have anticipated. Burstyn and Bogarde are happily married, and Warner, now clearly identified as Gielgud's bastard son, is on good terms with them both. Bogarde remains a seeker after moral language, but the hatred he supposedly bears his father as a result of his mother's death looms largely as a projection of Gielgud's own moral discomfort...